


Elysium

by Misaya



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Eruri Week, Eventual Levi/Erwin Smith, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Levi-centric (Shingeki no Kyojin), M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Character(s), Past Abuse, Past Relationship(s), Quiet, Reincarnation, Self-Doubt, but not quite like that, writer Erwin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-15 21:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 31,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3462683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misaya/pseuds/Misaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lot can happen in two years. In fact, it's just long enough for promises made to be forgotten, for two people to drift apart. </p><p>And also just long enough for someone to find himself amongst the debris that clutters when two suddenly shatters into one.</p><p>Betaed by TwistedK, send her some love~</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Single

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fractalbright](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fractalbright/gifts).



Erwin's fingers drummed insistently on his thighs as he paced the length of the airport terminal once, twice, a third time, jittery with anxiety and excitement and nerves. Mike was coming, he was coming back, he was probably on that plane whose tail he could just make out through the thick fog that lay over the San Francisco International Airport on this chilly, overcast day in the middle of February. Mike had been stationed overseas, at the Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan, and Erwin hadn't seen him in at least two years. The letters and postcards, all bearing Japanese stamps and large red official-looking stamps, hadn't really told him too much about the welfare of the man who'd left two years ago, clomping onto a plane, a heavy duffel bag slung over his shoulder, with a grin flung back at him and a carefree wave that had just been discernible through the thick glass of the plane window.

The flight that he was on would be a returning flight of soldiers from around the Pacific Rim, and no, not like the movie, he'd said, just the slightest bit irritably when Erwin had laughed. Erwin had been tired then, 15 hours into the past, awake at one in the morning for no other good reason than to talk to his -

That was another problem, Erwin mused to himself, as he paced back and forth in front of the arrivals screen, his hands curling into fists in the pockets of his leather jacket. It was one thing to promise each other, to swear while they were both still on American soil, that a long-term thing could work. It was quite another to actually put it into practice.

Mike had never exactly been the type to shower anybody with affection, which was why, Erwin thought wryly, it made sense that he would always be the one leaving. They'd been discussing the future over Skype for when Mike got back, and Erwin couldn't help but notice that Mike's sentences had always started with I. I want to travel the world. I want to visit Buckingham Palace and the cliffs of Dover. I want to see the Sistine Chapel. I want to go to Jiafen and get drunk in a monsoon while the lanterns dance over my face. There had been no mention of Erwin going with him, had been no implicit mention of 'we' or of 'us' in his tone, and Erwin had been tired and dazed and had been irritated with problems that Mike couldn't really hope to understand, all the way across the ocean and the spaces of time and thought.

They had been boyfriends, but that seemed a bit juvenile. Definitely not something he'd put in one of his books. Companions? Partners? Those seemed like more appropriate terms. But that had only applied to the man Erwin had been two years ago, and the man Mike had been boarding the plane to Asia.

He wondered what Mike would be like, stepping off the plane, back into a life he had abandoned. He looked around the terminal. It was grey and cottony in the clear air around the terminal, and from the snatches of life he'd managed to glean from the postcards and letters and occasional Skype calls at one in the morning, he imagined Mike walking back into chilly San Francisco a character filled with vibrancy and light and color. A splash of ink dissolving into water, curling and wraithing into gorgeous shapes before invariably flitting away, out of sight and out of mind.

The terminal was unnaturally empty for a Tuesday morning, and Erwin could hear the clicks of his footsteps on the pristine white floor as he walked back and forth, the bright blue screen flashing arrival times from destinations around the world. Erwin hadn't really travelled too much outside of the United States; the farthest he'd ever been from home was one semester in Florence to study abroad, and the occasional family weekends to Vancouver, where his mother had relatives. The terminal smelt like lemon floor polish, stale coffee, and the scent of oncoming rain. The only people he could see were the tired souls who had the graveyard shifts at the airport, who were standing, slouching behind the counters of coffee shops and 24-hour convenience marts and trying to stifle their yawns.

Erwin wondered what the Tokyo airport was like. It was another place he would never step foot in, another experience that Mike would have without him, each moment a separation from what they had once been, footsteps carrying him farther and farther away from the past. He sighed, wondering what to do about the whole thing. He'd felt his resolve wavering the first instant Mike turned his back to him at the terminal, so many months ago, had wanted to reach out and tug him back by the leather of his dark jacket, wanted to ask him to give Erwin a few more minutes of his time because once he left it would be over, they would be over.

A cool, clerical voice rang out over the intercom. "Flight 692 from Tokyo, arriving at Gate 7." His heart skipped a beat. It seemed hard to believe that he'd thought, two years ago, that this day would never come, seemed hard to comprehend that he'd spent the past two years of his life without Mike. It had been an adventure, a flirtation with self-development, learning to step into his own shoes again. And there had been times over the past two years, undoubtedly, where he'd thought about what it might be like to go to a club, and go home to lose time in cold sheets, wrapped in the embrace of strange limbs.

He had. But only once, and he'd woken up with a pounding head, a dry mouth, sheets mussed around him, and his wallet significantly lighter. Whoever it had been, whoever'd left the shower dripping with shampoo froth, whoever had helped themselves to some of the orange juice in his fridge and left the door unlocked without ceremony, had been a blur of pale flesh and dark hair in his mind, already fading away as quickly as they'd come into his life.

That was the moment that had defined him, he thought grimly to himself as he watched the ramp folding out, extending out from the building to receive the passengers on the plane. That was the moment he'd realized that he no longer loved Mike. Or, more accurately, he didn't love him enough. He'd accepted this conclusion with dry eyes, but now that the time was actually here to pick him up from the airport, now that the time was here to come face to face with the person he'd chosen to spend the last few years of his life with, it was just a bit harder to reconcile that fact.

Aside from himself, the people in the waiting area at Gate 7 were all families, spouses and children and parents, sleeping with heads on each other's shoulders in neat, little slumped rows in the grey chairs of the terminal. There was another man standing by the large glass walls, his slender frame outlined against the grey cloudiness outside, staring outside. Even from this distance, Erwin could see that the man held himself rigid and tense, his shoulders held firmly back and his hands curled into fists at his sides. He watched him idly as the first soldiers began to come up the ramp, all beige boots and dark uniforms and black duffel bags. The families around them started to rouse themselves, rubbing at aching eyes with their knuckles and brightening immediately upon laying their sight on their loved ones.

He couldn't exactly remember a time when Mike hadn't been in his life, and that scared him. His life had been twined so neatly around Mike's that Erwin didn't realise he was slowly, but surely, being suffocated.

And that was all very well and good that he'd realized it, he thought to himself, smiling absentmindedly at the cheerful cry of a little girl being reunited with her father. But complete extrication was surely another matter.

He waited for what felt like ages, his hands stuffed deep into his jeans pockets, soldiers streaming out around him. The waiting area filled with chatter, a bubble of vivacity within the stillness of the terminal, only marred with the pockets of silence surrounding Erwin and the man standing by the window. He had turned slightly, now in profile to the cloudiness outside, but Erwin couldn't make out any of his features other than vague strands of hair that seemed to fall over his forehead. He seemed to be looking for somebody, but not one of the soldiers spilling out of the opened double doors even so much as glanced at him.

It had been about ten minutes, and the waiting area was already starting to empty, families flooding out into the rest of the terminal to infect the greyness with their color and cheer. Erwin tapped his foot impatiently on the carpet, wondering what was keeping Mike. The man by the window had wrapped his hands around his upper arms, his shoulders starting to slump, starting to look just the tiniest bit defeated.

Just when Erwin was contemplating what the consequences would be of just walking out of the terminal and out of Mike's life completely (answer: none immediate), Mike himself came walking up the ramp with another soldier, all 6 feet 5 inches of him, black duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He hadn't seen Erwin yet, and even from here, Erwin could see the smile characteristic lifting up the corner of his mouth, the stubble he'd probably grown on the flight over, the way his eyebrows arched as he angled his body toward the other soldier to tell him something.

"Hey," he said, forcing into his mouth into a reluctant smile as Mike and the other soldier approached him. Mike wrapped him in a hug, smelling of smoke and a different brand of aftershave that Erwin wasn't used to; it irritated his nose, and he had to hold back a sneeze. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"

"It has," Mike agreed, tone deep and soothing and husky; it was surprising, Erwin thought absentmindedly, his eyes still fixed on a point somewhere over Mike's left shoulder, where the other man was still standing, now curled in on himself. "I've missed you." His mouth grazed over Erwin's in a light kiss that just barely skimmed over the skin of his lips.

Once the initial greetings had been dispensed with, Mike turned to the other soldier, introducing him as his bunkmate; the name passed out of Erwin's head almost as instantly as it had entered. The other soldier smiled politely at him, his handshake firm and confident, his farewells to the both of them said in a deep voice that possessed the huskiness of a well-seasoned smoker. Mike turned to say goodbye to him, and the way his face tilted towards the other's was how Erwin knew. Mike had started a new life, one where he wasn't even a thought, wasn't even a dream or a breath.

But you hate smoke, he wanted to say, trying to press down the confusing tangle of emotions that threatened to spill over into his voice. You hated the way it clung to our clothes and our hair and our voices when we went out to bars at night. You said it irritated your throat.

It was odd, how relief and despair could exist so simultaneously.

As the man was fading away into the terminal, Mike turned to Erwin, finally scrutinizing him, eyes flicking over every aspect of Erwin's face, examining, critical. Mike had changed, Erwin thought to himself, letting his gaze drop from Mike's intense one. everything had changed, and they didn't belong to each other anymore.

"Let's go home, yeah?" Mike's voice startled Erwin out of his thoughts, and he looked up again. Home was Cow Hollow, home was a multimillion dollar 3,000-square foot building in the heart of San Francisco, home was a place with a bedroom, half of the bed going soft from disuse, home was a place paid for by words and books that bore Erwin's name. Home no longer seemed like a place that could contain a 'we' or an 'us.' Home was definitely a place for a 'me.'

"Right," he mumbled, more out of a way to fill the silence that stretched between them; it never failed to astonish him how the only words he seemed to be able to manipulate were ones that were set in black type on the soft glow of a laptop screen. "Let's go home."

As they turned to leave, the man from the window came hurrying over, clearly in a state of distress. "excuse me," he said, in a voice that was strained with anxiety and fear. "I'm looking for someone who was supposed to come back on that flight?"

The plane seemed to have disgorged all its passengers; the only people still coming up through the ramp were stewardesses, dark caps pinned neatly over thick blonde curls, uniforms nipped in at the waists and bright smiles pasted over tired faces. Their black high heels clattered over the tile floor, clicking off into the distance as they, too, faded into the coffee shops scattered around the airport.

"Who are you looking for?" Mike asked him, shifting his duffel bag from hand to hand. Now that the man was closer, Erwin let his eyes rest on his fine, pinched features, grey eyes that looked slightly limned red, a shock of dark hair, strands falling over his forehead, tousled as though he'd been running his hands through his hair in anxiety. His lips were pressed tight together, turning slightly white in the center, and the sharp planes of his cheekbones made his milky skin glow in the opacity.

"Farlan Church?" His voice tilted upwards at the end, hopeful, almost.

Mike muttered something under his breath before clearing his throat and replying. "Look, I'm really sorry, but Church is..." He paused; this, too, was a new development. Mike had never been one to fumble for his words. "Church is missing."

Erwin was expecting a sharp gasp, a moan of pain, and he winced in preparation for the onslaught of emotion from the bad news. But when he looked at the man, he was nothing short of surprised to see his face still dry, still taut and tense, still looking at Mike like he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. His gaze flicked over to Erwin's, the unwitting spectator in a drama he could never hope to comprehend, as if to ask him, 'Can you believe this? Because I can't.'

"I'm sorry," Mike repeated again, taking Erwin's hand in his own. His palm felt coarse, calloused, and the roughness of it against Erwin's skin only further reminded him of how far apart they'd drifted in the past two years. Two birthdays, two Christmases, two Thanksgivings where he'd stared across the empty expanse of tablecloth and wondered if this was what it might be like for the rest of his life. Erwin personally didn't think it was a half bad way to live. The touch of his hand irritated him, and he wanted to tug away, regain the sense of himself he'd been carefully cultivating over the past two years.

The man turned away from them, casting his face in shadow once again. Erwin could just make out a lip, pulled tight between teeth underneath the soft slope of his nose, as though he were biting the words he wanted to say down. And then Mike was tugging him forwards, and he let himself be taken away, swept away in an unstoppable current from the storm of silence surrounding the other man.

As they passed a mobile-charging kiosk, Erwin couldn't help but glance back over his shoulder. The other man was standing by the window again, his hands, long slender fingers pressed up against the thick glass, curling slightly at the top joints as though trying to reach for something beyond the glass, beyond the airport, beyond the ocean. His shoulders were twitching minutely, and Erwin opened his mouth to say something to Mike, say that perhaps we should turn back, but he got stuck on the first word. There was no more 'we,' and though their hands were laced with each other's, studying Mike's face in profile, he thought that personally they'd never been more far apart.

* * *

Later that night, as Erwin was lying in bed and trying to ignore the almost stifling heat of Mike sleeping beside him, Levi pushed open the door to the apartment on Mission. He'd spent the entire day at the airport terminal waiting for Farlan, his heart skipping beats whenever a new arrival from Tokyo or Taiwan was announced, unable to believe that it was actually true, that Farlan was actually gone.

Of course, he'd gotten the letter a few months ago, the twine-wrapped package of last effects. A silver hip flask engraved with his initials, his dog tags, the lucky seashell he carried around with him wherever he went. The letter hadn't said anything about how he'd died, if he'd died, even, and, if it had, Levi wasn't sure he would have cared. But it was just so hard to believe that Farlan really, truly, was never coming back, that somewhere up in the ether of the universe, some higher being was listening to the wishes he dreamt in the dead of night.

It was terrifying. It was incredible. It was liberating.

Levi settled himself onto the squashy leather couch in his tiny living room, closing his eyes with a smile as he pillowed his head on his arm. He traced the constellation of cigarette burns on his inner wrist, his lips brushing over the circles of silver smooth skin.

That was when the tears came, against his bidding, seeping out from under his eyelashes to trickle slowly into his ears.


	2. Drowning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to TwistedK and Flameobender for betaing.

The rain enveloped the city in a haze, fog coming down to kiss the grey streets and sending chilly fingers trickling down the shirt collars of anyone who happened to be out walking. Levi wrapped his arms tight around his chest as he sat up in bed, his gaze straying unconsciously to the other half of the mattress, sheets still unruffled, pillow uncreased and still plump without the weight of a sleeping head. Though Farlan hadn't been around for a year and some months to ruffle the sheets or disrupt the pillow's cool surface, it was still difficult for Levi to look at it and know that it truly was a permanence. He still slept stiff, straight, still woke up with cricks in his neck, his limbs even in sleep afraid to stray out and explore the vastness that Farlan's absence had revealed to him.

It irked him, how Farlan still seemed to have a hold on him even though he'd long ago departed from the world. His body, true in its unconscious actions, kept peeking back over his shoulder, wary, in dreams, ears alert and startling for any bangs or the slotting of keys into locks, listening intently for sloppy scraping footsteps over hardwood floors. And his heart, true in its unconscious, still skipped a beat whenever he came upon something of Farlan's, a packet of the cigarettes he'd favored stuffed in the back of a desk drawer, still tarry and strong with the scent of tobacco; a shirt making its involuntary way into the laundry basket that seemed too big for just one person; a scrap of paper with Farlan's messy, slanting handwriting scrawled across it, lists and numbers and names that Levi crumpled up without reading, depositing them in the rubbish bin with blurry eyes.

_"Whoever you end up with in life," Levi's father had told him, coughing and scrabbling for Levi's hand with withered hands, the clear, thin tube of his IV swinging out in a wild arc, "make sure they make you happy. Okay? Promise me."_

Levi had never been particularly close to either of his parents. They had been the type of man and woman who worked much better as husband and wife rather than a mother and a father. Levi, even as a young child, had peeked out from between the bars of the banisters, metal cool in his hands, watching as his parents held hands, wrapped each other in embraces, bodies wound so tightly in the soft blue glow of the television screen that it seemed impossible to believe that a breath could ever come between them, let alone the unwieldy mass of a child who had been an unplanned consequence.

Of course his parents had never told him that, but it was something that Levi had discovered quickly. The families in the picture books, and later, the novels he consumed his time with, were picture perfect, a loving mother and a caring father who doted upon their children and treated them as extensions of themselves. The typed serifs raised him, caressed his dreams with pleasantries, stood in stark contrast to reality.

Levi wondered to himself now, padding to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, if that was why he'd turned out the way he had, if the words had been too good of an escape. Though he'd promised his father on his deathbed, had promised that he would find someone to make him happy, promises easily made were promises easily broken. But he and Farlan had had some good times together, he mused, pouring out a measure of black coffee and lifting the cup to his face, closing his eyes in the steam and reveling in the warm, dark scent that surrounded him. They had been happy, sometimes, when Farlan's breath wasn't heavy with alcohol, when Levi had been able to study his sleeping profile next to him in the grey light of early, early morning, when he'd cupped Levi's face in a broad hand and told him that he'd loved him more than anything else in the world.

The carafe was still half-full as Levi set down his empty mug next to it. Though he hadn't remembered reaching up to pull down the second mug, its handle chipped, from the cupboard by the sink, there it stood, infallibly, unquestioningly, a silver spoon standing upright in it, bottom already coated with a few spoonfuls of nondairy creamer and a packet of sweetener.

Levi's fingers were aching; looking down now, he saw that he'd curled his hands into fists, clenched tight, knuckles white. When he unwrapped his fingers from their tight ball, his palm was marred with pale red crescents, crimson slivers of remembrance.

Happiness. It was such an odd promise to make, and an even harder one to keep, because every spark fizzled out eventually, because once the candle flame blew out, there was still the shadow to contend with, omnipresent and lurking in the background of his life, a monster that only came out when he thought that maybe it had gone for good.

He swept the other mug into the sink, his heart pounding wildly as the china shattered against the stainless steel, glass shards littering the metal and dusting it with a fine layer of white powder. Levi suddenly felt sick, a sour, acid taste in the back of his throat, his stomach clenching in on itself, a fist punching itself into his lungs and knocking away his breath. He clutched at the edge of the sink, his mouth open, sweat beading out on his forehead, waiting for something, anything. His racing heart started to slow as he forced himself to focus on the shards of porcelain in the sink, studying the jagged edges, at the swirls of white powder that shivered with every panting breath he took.

"Oh, oh, no," he whispered frantically to himself, his words lost against the sound of the heavy deluge outside slapping against the windows of the apartment. His fingers scrabbled, panicked, across the bottom of the sink, scooping up the sharp slivers of porcelain, trying to put them back into a semblance of the mug they had once been. A fragment of lip here, a handle there. But it was broken, irretrievably, infinitesimally sharp digging into his fingerprints and smearing crimson across the ivory, Levi's eyes blurring the mess into a sea of scarlet and chalk as he pressed a knuckle, metallic, into his mouth and tried to hold back his tears.

He wasn't quite sure what the words would have to say about this. This sort of thing didn't happen in books, not the ones he read, at least. This sort of thing was ugly, was frightful and ghastly and vile, wasn't neatly contained between twenty-six letters and the spaces between them. It would taint the perfect universe of a novel, like ink spilling into water, blossoming and blooming to touch every single thing around it.

As the sting and throb came back to settle into his fingers, Levi looked outside at the rain streaming down the glass of the kitchen window, painting the world into watery, smudged outlines, unclear and uncertain.

* * *

Mike had taken the news as well as it was possible for one to handle the information that they were being broken up with. And, for all the work Erwin did with words and letters and sentences, for all the times he'd written subtlety into his stories to create a more emotional back layer for his characters, he'd delivered the news so bluntly that, looking back, he couldn't help but wince.

"I'm not in love with you anymore," over the morning newspaper, delivered suddenly and abruptly, his mouth going so dry that he thought he was in serious danger of choking on his toast.

Mike had sighed, heavily, folding the newspaper and placing it by his plate. "Okay," he'd said, quietly, unchallenging, and Erwin wanted to shout at him, damn him, because this was not how a normal person acted when they received the news that they no longer had a place in someone else's life. But that had been it. Okay. As if it hadn't mattered, really, one way or the other, as if it was that easy to disentangle themselves from the roots of engagements they'd woven around each other for years and years and years.

And Erwin had wanted this, had relished the freedom he'd had for two years, but when it actually came time for his deliverance, he'd hesitated, wanting to reach out and place a hand on Mike's shoulder as he packed up boxes and suitcases, folding away items of their life together. There had been no question that he would be the one to leave, and even now, as Erwin sat at the kitchen table, staring hard at his laptop screen and wondering why the words wouldn't come to his fingertips, he wondered if he'd made a mistake.

Maybe he was in a state of shock, he mused, cutting a piece of him out irreverently and leaving no room for the severance to heal. The only thing left of Mike were the memories, the photographs that were scattered haphazardly around the home and around the sprawling reaches of social media, the packet of cigarettes he'd left in the bathroom, the ones that were unfiltered and smelt strongly of tobacco. Erwin had lit one up, his hand shaking as he'd stood by the stove, nearly burning the base of his thumb in the process. He'd lifted it to his face, taken a smoky inhale, had shuddered and coughed out the black smoke all over the kitchen, left breathless by its intensity.

He opened the kitchen window, trying to clear the acrid tang of smoke and ash out of his mind, letting the rain outside sweep into patter lightly on the tiles of the kitchen floor. It was pouring, stinging needles of ice smacking against Erwin's skin at random intervals. The trees and bushes quivered in the howling gusts, sheets of water melting down from the sky and blurring the lines between.

Erwin squinted out the window, the gauze curtains billowing in the icy breeze. There was someone or something moving out there, smudging its way through the opaque landscape, streets and names and histories being wiped away and sweeping down the asphalt into the sewers. His mind tilted backwards, thinking about that man. The one he'd been wondering about ever since the day at the terminal.

As Levi wormed his way back into the forefront of Erwin's mind again, Erwin took another deep breath of the icy air, holding it till it burnt his lungs, and felt a sentence work its way into his fingertips.

* * *

The bathwater had long since gone tepid and chilly around Levi, his pale skin had already wrinkled in the water, the suds already long evaporated. He lay back in the tub, the cold porcelain numbing against the bare skin of his neck, the pale, rainy light of the early afternoon streaming in through the window set high above the tiles and piercing through the thin flesh of his eyelids, casting his vision in streaks of pink and grey. Levi took a breath, and Loneliness expelled it out. The solitude and the silence were overwhelming, and he wondered if he had already died, if this was some special form of Purgatory for the especially fiendish sinners.

He sank down in the water, letting it embrace him with its chilly strokes across his shoulders, around his neck, pressing soft tendrils to his mouth as he slipped completely underneath. He opened his eyes underneath, ignoring the sting against his irises as he stared up through the wavering clarity. His lungs started to protest, sparks of darkness spilled across his vision, and he was about to start making mental provisions for the afterlife when a sentence he'd recently read popped into his mind.

_I, too, know what it is like to love and to lose and to be left wanting._

He struggled out of the water, deep ragged breaths echoing noisily around the bathroom, shaking water from his eyes and coughing. What book had it been? It had been imperfect, it had been a story that had gripped Levi's soul and wrung it to the core, it had been uncomfortable and it had been beautiful and every word had wormed its way into Levi's mind as though they understood.


	3. Slashing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm just going to stop apologising for being slow in updating, because I'm always this way, so it's become the norm as opposed to an oddity. 
> 
> Betaed by TwistedK, much thanks :)

He had never paid much attention to the ghost in his bathroom mirror. It had only occurred to him after he'd scrubbed the heel of his hand across the steamed glass after a boiling hot shower he'd taken, one that had left his nerves raw and his skin red.

But the sliver of face that he'd glimpsed for the briefest of moments in the clear patch of glass had to be a spectre, a ghoulish misrepresentation of the person he was supposed to be.

The ghost in the mirror had dark hair that flopped in jagged shards across his forehead, long and unkempt and still sporting droplets of moisture at the tips. Dark purple circles, shadows of bruises, swarmed in moons in the thin skin under his eyes, as if dreams had eluded him from the beginning of his very existence. His lips were cracked, pink feathering away at the corners, thin and pinched tight as if determined to keep secrets in.

Levi had been surprised about what the mirror had revealed. It wasn't something that he'd been expecting, and ever since then he'd had difficulty trying to reconcile the ghost in his mirror with himself.

These days, he took his coffee black, bitter on his tongue, and he had thrown out the packets of creamer. He'd relished the numbness he'd felt as he crunched each bright white packet between his fingertips before letting it fall into the dark recesses of the garbage bin underneath the kitchen sink.

Slowly, but surely, he was learning how to let go. But time takes its measures on everybody, and he was still loath to discard the pictures, still hesitant about donating some of the dress shirts Farlan had worn, starch still fresh along the collars. The name was never far from the tip of his tongue, and he felt sure that the ghost in his mirror understood only too well.

It was the third week of February. The San Francisco sky was foggy outside Levi's front window, a heavy chill in the air that he could feel warping up through the floorboards into the soles of his bare feet. He shuddered, hugging his arms close to his body and rubbing warmth into his limbs through the heavy wool of his sweater.

It wasn't that Levi was particularly opposed to the idea of modern technology like central heating or running water, and it wasn't that Levi's financial affairs were particularly dire. The reality was far from that. He still couldn't quite bring himself to approach the radiator, great shiny coils of metal gleaming in the milky San Francisco greyness by the front window, where he swore he could still see the shadows of Farlan's particularly wrinkled dress shirts, hung there to press and steam. His bank account had a pretty sum in it, one that Levi would have been mortified by if he had any other standard to compare it to. The amount was obscene, reaching well into the seven digits, and was only growing passively through interest.

His parents had died close to each other, just a few months apart, and the speakers at his father's funeral had joked, tearily, that it was because of a broken heart. His mother had been victim of a stroke, one that had taken her away from this life and catapulted her violently into the next in the space of a few minutes while she was at the supermarket, eyeballing the relative merits of soy vs. almond milk. Levi hadn't received the news until much, much, much later, his father's gravelly voice over the phone informing him that he was motherless, but, unspoken and yet much more importantly, that he was now a widower. He remembered feeling a sort of nothingness, a lack of empathy, a lack of emotion for the grieving man on the other end of the telephone wires, who had started to sob again. He remembered hanging up, placing the phone back quietly into its cradle. He remembered turning back onto his side and meeting Farlan's eyes, surprisingly awake and alert, glowing at him in the darkness and asking him who could possibly have been calling him at one in the morning, and did he have anything to hide?

And when he'd received the news that his father had died (official cause: heart attack, or at least that's what it had read on the death certificate, signed by a doctor whose signature Levi didn't have the desire to puzzle out), he'd wanted to laugh. He remembered clutching the phone tightly against his ear, feeling the cool plastic grow hot against his skin. He remembered wanting to snort at how cliched it all was; he'd just seen the man a few days ago, had sat by his bedside and listened to him raving out at all the possibilities Levi's life contained and making half-hearted promises that he never intended to keep. He remembered hanging up, remembered Farlan's arms tight around his chest, a soft whisper in his ear about how he was free now to become the person he'd always wanted to be.

He remembered wondering exactly who that person was.

The executor of his parents' wills hadn't even batted an eye as he'd outlined the facts and details of his inheritance. Levi became rich, seemingly overnight, but it felt wrong, horrendously so, accepting the money of people who seemed like strangers. It sat in the bank, a number with several zeros behind it, and Levi had never done anything important with it other than setting up an automatic bill pay system for his utilities and credit card. The statements Wells Fargo mailed out to him every month were promptly shredded and thrown out with the previous day's newspapers, because, quite frankly, Levi didn't want to have anything to do with it. It felt wrong, like a gift gone sour, an apology for prioritizing being a husband and a wife over a mother and a father.

In short, Levi was set for a life by himself.

Farlan had, in one fell swoop, become the only person in Levi's world, and every word, every glance, every sigh had been something momentous, an occasion to be remembered.

Levi's stomach growled, raw and empty beneath his skin, and, with a final glance at the radiator, he turned on his heel and padded into the kitchen.

* * *

Erwin sighed in irritation, a crease appearing between his eyebrows as he ran his hands through his already tousled hair for what felt like the thousandth time in the past hour. His kitchen table was littered with crumpled up scraps of paper, the white surfaces littered with smeared words and blots of ink where the pen had bled through. He'd gotten cross with the insistent blinking of his cursor in the blank Word document, had closed the lid with a firm click, and had resorted to his tried and true method of breaking through the mental wall of writer's block that had thrown itself up ever since Mike had left his life, leaving nothing behind but some photographs and the faint, lingering scent of cigarette smoke that at this point Erwin was sure he was just imagining.

He'd spent the better part of the morning scribbling down words that felt good in his mouth, words that appealed to him, hoping that something, anything would kickstart a stream of creativity to break down the dam inside his head.

Namaste.   
Caprice.  
Benediction.

Since Mike had left, Erwin had been enjoying his newfound freedom, his limbs starting to learn that they could creep out all over the mattress without fear of bumping into someone else. He finally found that he had room to breathe, had all the time in the world so he could sleep in as late as he wanted, could eat in bed if he so wished, could spend entire days in his pajamas without anyone saying anything.

But, by the same token, the silence had started to grow oppressive. The words that he'd once felt gathering in the joints of his fingertips seemed to have evaporated into the air with Mike's disappearance, and the story that he'd felt right behind the tip of his tongue had come abruptly and irritatingly to a standstill. The main character, who, subconsciously, Erwin had given the attributes of the man in the airport terminal, had been stopped in his tracks, motionless, his hand raised and waiting for the next plot point to come his way, and Erwin was powerless to help.

His pen skittered across the college-ruled lined paper once more, doodles of swirls and loops and cursive letters strung together without any meaning. He rested his cheek on an open palm, staring out the kitchen window at the late February fog. It was ghost weather, as his parents had used to call it, where the people that had died in recent times came back to see how the living were getting on, their collective presences congealing into a dense cloud that enveloped you in chilly arms the instant you stepped outside.

Thinking about his parents put a sour taste in his mouth, and he stood up, stretching and rubbing his temples as he walked over to the fridge and pulled it open, lifting a carton of orange juice to his mouth and letting the cold citrus work its way over his tongue.

He hadn't talked to his parents in three years. Correspondence had all but ceased between them, only the occasional card of 'Congratulations,' written in a begrudging hand whenever a new novel went selling on the shelves. He supposed he'd been foolish, thinking that perhaps conservative ideals and a religious background fifty years in the making were barriers too tall to overcome.

They hadn't been mad when he'd told them Mike was his boyfriend, was the person whose toothbrush they'd seen in the bathroom on the other side of the sink. They'd been ashen and pale, eyes furious with disappointment, and that had been even worse.

He shook his head, trying to forget the moment he'd unwittingly severed ties with his parents, and plopped himself back down in his seat at the kitchen table, picking up his pen again.

Elysium.

A place or state of perfect happiness, or the place at the ends of the earth to which certain favored heroes were conveyed after death, if trusty Merriam Webster could be believed. Erwin sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in an attempt to stave off the impending headache that he could feel building up right behind his eyelids. Such a place didn't exist, he thought to himself as he firmly capped the pen and crumpled up the piece of paper.

There was no such thing.

* * *

The author's name was Erwin Smith, and he looked like a perfectly nice, perfectly well-adjusted young man on the path to success on the back of the book jacket. His breakthrough story had been some crime, some thriller, something about coming of age and self-discovery that Levi had devoured hungrily in one sitting, gobbling up the sentences like a dying man clutching at straws, which, he supposed, he sort of was. He had been lost in a sense of stasis ever since he'd found the book, its crimson spine face outward and the pages still crisp, and he'd pulled it out and had spent the whole of a day curled up in bed, his eyes aching as he pored over the words. It felt as though Erwin was in the room, so close he could smell the spicy tang of his aftershave, talking to him and explaining concepts he'd never heard about and looking concerned when Farlan hadn't come strolling out of the airplane.

Erwin and the man in the terminal were one and the same, Levi had reconciled that to himself a long time ago. He'd spent the past few nights wondering if the other man in the terminal, the one who had brusquely told him that 'Church was missing,' was still with Erwin. The reunion had seemed cold, polite, so formal that Levi could feel his posture stiffening unconsciously, shoulders drawing back and head lifting up and spine straightening without his orders. But perhaps Levi had been imagining it.

But now that the book was over, Levi felt bereft, abandoned, lonelier than he had felt ever since he'd found out Farlan wasn't actually going to be coming back. A quick Internet search of Erwin's name had led him to his Wikipedia page and to a list of works he'd written, and he ached to read them, longed to have Erwin's words forging paths into his frozen soul once again, wanted it with an intensity that frightened him, burning bright and hot in the core of his heart.

He'd never felt that way about Farlan. He'd always felt that way about Farlan.

Farlan had left him, he thought angrily, and though it had always been what he'd wanted, perhaps even from the very start, it was still lonely to wake up to an empty bed and an equally empty life. He frowned as he yanked out a kitchen drawer, perhaps a little more violently than intended, and a silver gleam caught his eye. He looked down, the sharp edge of a knife dancing over his vision, reflecting curious eyes back at him, a sliver of his face, and he wondered breathlessly for a moment what it would feel like to draw it across his skin, to watch red bead up along the surface, to feel closer to Heaven than he probably deserved to.

But Erwin still had all those other books that Levi hadn't yet read, and if there were any worldly wants to tempt him back into the realm of the living, this certainly was one of them.

Levi spent another moment gazing at his reflection before bumping the drawer closed with his hip and heading over to the other side of the kitchen, wondering if he had any takeout menus in another drawer.


	4. Disappearing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beta'ed by TwistedK, written to
> 
> [Atmosphere - Kaskade, Instrumental Cover by Cityincolors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imMPUun2uzY)
> 
> .

There are plenty of stories with happy endings, where the girl and the boy leap into the realm of husband and wife, where the prince finds the princess, where the protagonist finds the hopeful gleam of the sunrise right around the next corner. This is not one of those stories. This is far more realistic.

It had been ages since Levi had been out by himself. Leaving the apartment, he'd almost left a note by the telephone, had even gone so far as to scribble where he'd be and what time he could be expected back, before he remembered that it didn't matter, since nobody would be waiting at home to ask him where he'd been.

The bookstore held the fresh smell of new paper and ink, words wrapped up tightly in colorful blankets, universes unique and waiting to be discovered just behind a price tag and a set of bindings.

Normally Levi would have headed directly to the fantasy section, eager to get his hands on another book that could transport him far away from the dreary realms of reality. Normally he would go for paperbacks, because, as he tried to justify to himself, he liked it when the spines got soft and creased, signs of a well loved story. That wasn't to mention the additional benefit that came with paperbacks being cheaper, and though Levi admittedly had more money than he knew what to do with, Farlan had kept strict tabs on everything, on every receipt, every penny, every action and every word and every breath.

But now, as he held another of Erwin Smith's books in his hands, the hardback cover soothingly smooth against his palms, he began to wonder if, perhaps, that wasn't normal. If, perhaps, these oddities were things he'd chosen to overlook in favor of allowing his heart to pulse in the direction of the closest voice that promised love.

_"Will you swear yourself to me?"_   
_"Can't you see how much I adore you?"_   
_"I love you."_

Levi traced the constellation of scars on his inner arm, skin silky smooth and pale.

Normal.

What a funny word.

* * *

Erwin had had enough of the house and its claustrophobic silence, oppressive and cloying. His writer's block hadn't gotten any better, no matter how many words he'd scribbled down onto scraps of paper, no matter how many hours he spent in front of his laptop staring at the clinical white of a fresh Word document.

He couldn't get the man from the terminal out of his mind. He was the main character in Erwin's new novel - if you could call it that. A few scenes and scribbles of dialogue do not a story make.

And then there was the question of that niggling bit of familiarity that Erwin couldn't seem to stave off. The man in the terminal was strange, but not a stranger, and Erwin felt that their lives had definitely crossed at some distinct intersection somewhere in the past.

But where?

_Pale flesh, dark hair, the scent of rain, the salt of tears in black satin sheets -_

The chimes of his mobile dragged him back into the present, and he glanced in irritation at the screen, where the name of his agent was displayed at the top. Sighing and mentally bracing himself for another long lecture about the progress of his book, or the lack thereof, he tapped on the green button and lifted the phone to his ear.

* * *

The book's title was Icebreaker, 467 pages of contemporary fiction stacked full of Erwin's words. Levi turned the book over in his hand, admiring the icy blue of the cover and how the black words of the reviews stood out in stark contrast, deep shadows of praise for a story that he had yet to discover.

The price tag at the bottom claimed it was $24.99 US/$28.99 CAN, and Levi's first reaction was to wince at how horridly expensive it seemed, what Farlan might say if he came home with the handles of the bookseller's bag wrapped around his wrist, how Farlan might take a glance at the back cover and ask how he could possibly justify $25 for a book that he'd read once and stock away on a shelf.

_I'd much rather have you at home than wasting your time browsing through old bits of pieces and paper in the city. You might get lost, and then you'd leave me no choice but to go after you. And I won't stand for that._

_The question had been left unanswered. Levi remembered that he'd been touched, awed by Farlan's concern for him, how the rare edition of Beowulf he'd brought home that day had gone into his bookshelf without a second glance. Farlan's kisses had drowned out the tone of his voice as he'd pushed the book into the shelf unceremoniously, before Levi could tell him to be careful. Farlan's hands had drowned Levi in strokes and grasps that, while maybe a bit too rough, filled his world with the overwhelming burden of his love._

Levi flipped the book open to a random page.

* * *

 

"Don't you see that's not how normal people are supposed to love each other?" Her shout echoed down the empty marble hallways of their home, and he grinned lopsidedly at her, leaning slumped against the doorway. The acrid aura of Wild Turkey coated his words with amber, some sloshing onto the cream carpet at his feet. He could no longer tell up from down. He could no longer tell his wife that this was exactly what was normal for him, that he was normal, because this was the only way that he knew how to love.

* * *

 

Levi's heart thudded in his chest, blood pulsing hot and frantic and creating a staccato drumbeat behind his ears. He snapped the book shut, his hands shaking, and quickly placed it back on the shelf, where it belonged. Books like that had no place in Levi's life, and it seemed unfair that Erwin should be able to speak to Levi so well about things that he wasn't even ready to mull over with himself.

An attendant tapped him on the shoulder after a few long minutes.

"Are you alright, sir?" she asked, tilting her head to the side and frowning at him in concern. "You look a little pale. Perhaps you'd like to sit down? Have a glass of water?"

Levi swallowed, his throat suddenly dry and the words sticking to the sides of his throat. He nodded silently, allowing her to lead him away from the stacks, and wondering when someone had asked him that question last.

* * *

Erwin had always thought it was funny, this way people had of asking others how they were and not really expecting an answer.

"How are you?"  
"I'm fine."   
"I'm good."  
"I'm well."

These were the worst kinds of lies, Erwin mused as he lowered himself into the driver's seat of his silver Nissan. They added up over the days, months, years, until you'd buried yourself so deeply beneath a layer of normalcy and fineness, of finesse, that to admit you were anything but would be shocking, horrifying. It was raining again, and he sat still for a few moments in the chilly leather interior, watching the clear drops racing down the windshield.

His agent had called him, reminding him that earlier in the year he'd agreed to go to a book signing at Green Apple Books on S. Clement. It had all but slipped his mind.

"And, er, how are you dealing with the breakup?" His agent had sounded unsure, then, the first time Erwin had ever heard him with a tone of doubt in his voice.

He'd thought about it for a moment. "I'm fine," he'd replied, and that had been the end of that particular conversation.

He clicked the windshield wipers on, watching the black plastic smudge his world blurry for an instant, uncertain, before clarity recovered itself and he began to remember.

* * *

Levi didn't see him when he came in, still busy trying to calm his racing heart.

But gradually he became aware of a flurry of motion near the front of the store, choruses of "Thank you so much!" and "We're so glad you could make it!" From his perch near the back of the bookstore, surrounded by picture books and fairy tales, Levi could just barely make out a flash of blonde hair and pale skin and black overcoat.

His hands began to quiver again, and he almost spat out the swallow of tepid water he held in his mouth. Surely it was impossible.

_Nothing's impossible, Farlan had whispered, his teeth dangerously close to Levi's skin. Just improbable._

_His whispers of 'I can't' went unheard, or ignored, and he wasn't sure which option he found the more frightening._

Curiosity dragged him out of his seat, brushing off the fantasies of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and other Happily Ever Afters. Levi wandered over to the 'Fiction and Literature' niche where a small group of people had already assembled. They were clutching copies of books whose titles Levi couldn't make out, a flurry of covers in burgundy and white and ebony. His breath caught in his throat at the slice of icy blue he was able to make out from between the dark sleeves of a woman's coat. She was looking in awe at someone sitting in the center of the section, someone who was currently hidden from view.

Levi held his breath and took a step forward.

* * *

Erwin didn't like book signings. They were tedious, monotonous, and usually filled with single mothers and last-minute holiday shoppers looking for the perfect customized gift.

This one was particularly bad. Driving here from his home in Cow Hollow, he'd been distracted by the rain spattering his windshield, the droplets fat and chilly, trickling down the glass like the last vestiges of the hasty cleansing that had taken place in his shower stall on that particular morning in late October of last year. Love for a night had been washed down the drain with shame and the suds of shampoo that his nightly amour had left on the tiles, and just like that, he'd been gone, disappearing out of Erwin's life as quickly and stealthily as he'd entered, without a name, without a number, without a face. Bits and pieces had been coming back to him ever since he'd greeted Mike at the airport terminal, ever since he'd realized that maybe he had nothing to be guilty about. Falling out of love wasn't a crime, surely, at least not something that you would find in any upstanding legal code. Falling into lust, however, might be a different matter.

He'd nearly driven his Nissan onto a sidewalk on Van Ness because he'd been trying to draw up any additional memories of that October night through the hazy fog of time. He'd been drunk, off life and freedom and one too many whiskey Cokes, and the itching pulse of the house music in the club had probably escalated things.

_He'd stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, the chill of the early morning seeping into his lungs. He'd taken a deep breath, two, the wintry air laced with the sharp tang of nicotine from an unfiltered cigarette. The deep thrum of bass pulsated through the soles of his shoes, and he had just barely managed to hear the sound of coughing._

_And there he'd been, standing by the railing, the gleaming cherry of a cigarette hanging from his fingertips and illuminating a strip of pale flesh that peeked out of the hem of his sleeve._

_A tattoo. Five overlapping circles all done in silver, like the Olympic Rings, a fuzzy memory that stood out to him from the depths of alcohol induced delusion._

Erwin had just gotten to the part where he'd spoken, had just gotten to the part where the man had started to turn, his profile still in shadow. And then the honks and shouts of several angry drivers had brought him back to his senses, his knuckles white in their clutch around the leather of the steering wheel, and he'd shaken his head to clear his thoughts and had merged into the left lane.

* * *

 

There had only been one time during Levi's relationship with Farlan where he'd stepped outside the bounds. And though it had meant nothing, though it had only been for a single night, though Farlan had never, and now would never, get the opportunity to find out, guilt still itched through the pit of Levi's stomach from time to time.

It had been a late night in the dead of October, at KnockOut. It was Levi's first time at a club, at least, his first time without Farlan. Because Farlan had been there, from the very beginning, from the very first time, a pair of dark eyes and wandering hands asking him if he could pretty please see him later in the week.

He remembered standing by the metal railing outside the club, feeling the bass of the house music pulsing through the core of his soul as he stared at the cherries of taillights passing him by. He remembered burning his thumb on the flame from the lighter, remembered wincing as he took a drag of the unfiltered cigarette, one he'd slipped from Farlan's stash at the apartment. The taste was bitter in his mouth, and he coughed it out, puffs of steam and smoke dissipating into the chill of the winter air.

"You look like you could use some company."

The voice behind him had been warm, friendly, a bit slurred, to be certain, but it wasn't something that Levi wasn't used to. He turned, cigarette dangling from his fingers. Unsteady. Unsure. Surer and steadier than he'd ever been.

He had cried, spilt tears across black satin sheets, because he had been barely able to understand how it felt so much different from before. It felt good, it felt lovely, and the man's hands were gentle as they curved around his waist, and he hadn't realised he'd been sobbing until he'd asked him, in a rather concerned tone, if he was feeling okay.

"No, no, I'm fine," he'd whispered, and the man had smiled and pressed a kiss to the hollow of his throat, stealing his voice away.

Levi had woken up in the early hours of the morning, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling, an unfamiliar face on the pillow next to him. He'd held his breath, waiting for whatever higher beings controlled this sort of thing to smite him down for infidelity, to crush him into nonexistence.

He'd taken a shower, luxuriously long and hot, scenting himself with citrus and ocean rain, had poured himself a glass of orange juice from the fridge, had wandered around the house, running his hands over the furniture, trying to absorb every tactile detail. The suede of the couch cushions. The silky smooth cherry wood of the cabinets, finished to an ebony shine. The wrought iron silver of the picture frames on the living room table.

Levi's hands had trembled then, too, his mouth dry, his heart pounding a staccato tattoo behind his rib cage.

 _You somehow find a way to ruin everything, don't you?_ Farlan's hiss in his head, as his thumb traced across the pale oval of one face, two, golden hair sheaves of sunlight underneath his fingertips.

_I'm sorry. The apology the following morning, kissing away bruises that had already started to circle his wrists like manacles. I'm so sorry, I'm just so scared of losing you, you understand?_

He'd placed the picture frame back down firmly on the table, a sour taste in his mouth, before heading out the door without a backward glance. As he directed his footsteps towards home, he found it odd, and somewhat scary, that no one walking through the city on that particular morning in late October took any notice of him.

* * *

He'd found himself admiring the raspberries littering the pale column of his neck for the following few days, touching them and pressing his fingertips to his lips.

He had been upset to see them fade away.

* * *

Erwin looked up after what felt like an eternity, his hand cramping and his cheeks aching from all the pictures he'd been asked to take with his loyal readers today.

Their eyes met for a second, a flash of blue on grey, before the other man dropped his gaze, a flame brushing rose across his cheeks. He turned, tugging his dark leather jacket tighter around himself, making to head out of the bookstore to disappear.

"Wait." Erwin slid past stacks and browsing shoppers, tracking the straight set of Levi's shoulders with his eyes. "Wait. Just give me a minute of your time. Please."

* * *

A minute. Sixty whole seconds. Just enough time to set a pot of coffee to brewing, just enough time to scrabble around for the remote that had fallen behind the sofa cushions, just enough time to change a life.

Levi stopped, turned, forcing his eyes to meet brilliant blue ones. A jolt of guilt, a jolt of lust, spilt through the pit of his stomach, because his body remembered, traitor that it was, running its emotions on its sleeve, letting blushes run rampant across his face, allowing bruises and bites and kisses to swell like rubies over his skin.

"I can't stop thinking about you."

Levi's eyes widened. They were islands, lost in the current of humanity streaming around them on the sidewalk. He had words on the tip of his tongue - I know, I remember, I see - but they got stuck, and he was left gaping up at the other.

"Sorry, that probably just sounds downright creepy." Erwin smiled apologetically, running a hand through already tousled blonde hair. "My name's Erwin Smith. We met at the airport terminal a few weeks ago, I believe." He held out his hand, broad, firm, strong, and Levi wondered if Erwin ever had dreams that tasted like late October.

He took his hand, and, for the first time in a long time, thought it might be better not to disappear.

* * *

"Will you swear yourself to me?" _I won't._  

"Can't you see how much I adore you?" _I can't._   
  
"I love you." _I don't._

"Are you okay?"   
_I'm not._


	5. Falling

Levi wrapped chilled hands around a steaming porcelain mug of cappuccino, trying to soak in the warmth through his palms as he looked out the huge glass-front windows that ran the length of the walls of the Cliff House. He remembered reading about this place in some online review or something of the sort, a place renowned for its legendary popovers, with fluffy, flaky, doughy insides that could melt in your mouth and were best eaten straight out of the basket the waiters delivered to your table every fifteen or so minutes, slathered thickly with butter and strawberry jam.

Levi had waited, biting the inside of his cheek to restrain himself from just diving headfirst into the wicker bread basket. The instant Erwin excused himself from the table to go use the restroom, his hand darted across the table, seemingly having developed a consciousness of its own. He nearly burned his thumb on the still steaming bread as he tore a popover apart, popping bites of soft, flaky dough into his mouth and chewing furiously. He had finished one and a half popovers before Erwin returned to the table.

"You can keep eating, you know," Erwin said gently, smiling as he slid back into his chair across from Levi. "I'm not going to stop you."

Levi looked at him warily before lowering his gaze and popping another bite of bread into his mouth.

"So tell me," Erwin said, placing his elbows on the table and lacing his fingers together in thought. "Care to explain why you've been occupying my thoughts so much?"

Levi stared into the beige pool of his coffee, watching the minuscule bubbles of steamed milk foam slowly dissipate across the surface, wondering what would be the right thing to say in this sort of situation. He personally had no idea why a man like Erwin would be so intrigued with a man like him. There was nothing particularly special about him, nothing particularly noteworthy, and if he was being truly honest with himself, he wasn't much without Farlan.

"I'm not sure," he said quietly, not meeting Erwin's gaze, running his finger absentmindedly along the rim of his coffee cup.

"Well," Erwin said, scrutinizing him, wondering why the other man was so reluctant to meet his eye. "Why don't we start with introductions, then? I'll start. My name is Erwin Smith. I'm a writer."

"I know," Levi said quietly, softly, his voice barely audible over the other customers' chatter and the breaking of the surf outside. The moment the words slipped out of his mouth, he wanted to bite them back, wanted to pull back the admission of knowledge that he'd inadvertently let loose.

_Be seen, not heard. You want to be good for me, don't you?_

He swallowed back the memory. "I read your books. Or some of them, at least," he said, flicking his gaze over to Erwin's brilliant blues for a millisecond before looking away again.

Erwin took note of the fact that the other man was worrying at the pleated edge of the tablecloth between his fingers, twining the tassels around the tip of his index finger, knotting and unknotting and unraveling. Antsy. Restless.

He took a closer look at Levi across the table, noting the puckered set of his mouth as though he was trying to hold his words inside.

Scared.

Erwin let his eyes wander over the other man's profile, over the slender, graceful line of his neck, over the firm lines of his torso, frame cradled in a black sweater that barely did justice to the soft shaded hollows of his clavicles. As the other man lifted the cappuccino to his mouth again, his sleeve tugged up, caught on the bend of his elbow. Erwin caught a flash of silver, a semicircle shading his wrist, before the other man absentmindedly tugged the black fabric down again.

Intrigue. Half-formed memories.

Erwin wanted to ask him if he remembered him, wanted to reach across the table and cup the other's face in broad palms, force him to look, force him to admit, force him to give up the secrets that he kept guarded so well. Instead, he asks for his name.

"Levi." The reply was quiet. "My name is Levi Ackerman." He seemed to be asking permission with the softness of every syllable, as if he needed a confirmation that that name did indeed belong to him.

"Which book did you like the best, Levi Ackerman?" Erwin liked the way the name sounded, smooth and full in his mouth. He briefly wondered if it might be a breach of privacy or plagiarism to use that name for the protagonist in his novel. Or, at least, the novel in progress. Or, to be honest, the novel that currently was in no danger of being published anytime soon.

"I thought the ones I read were all very good." The tone of his voice was definitive, firm, and Erwin decided not to press the subject any further. It was readily apparent that Levi Ackerman was a man who liked to keep his words close, and his thoughts even closer. He seemed to be the type of person who tread on the path of least resistance, but there was something about the set of his mouth that indicated something else. That indicated preference, favorites, a deeper set of wishes that Erwin desperately wanted to know more about.

But not now. It would be too much, too fast, and Erwin didn't consider it particularly ethical to storm in and pry apart the secrets of Levi's universe when he hadn't even asked him for his phone number yet.

* * *

The man - no, Erwin Smith, Levi would have to get used to calling him by his name - had asked him for his telephone number. Levi had almost given him Farlan's number, his lips pursing around the first digit (2), before he remembered that Erwin had asked for his cell number. Not for a number that he liked to call sometimes, to hear a ghost.

"I...don't have one," Levi said finally, thinking of lonely nights when he'd curled up with the cordless phone, hugging Farlan's pillow to his chest, and listening to his voice telling him to please leave a message after the beep. Levi had left messages, tens, dozens, hundreds of them by this point, he was sure, but Farlan had yet to reply to a single one.

He supposed he should have expected that.

"Well, when you do get around to joining us in the twenty-first century," Erwin said, eyes twinkling, "here's my number." He took out a fountain pen from an inside pocket of his overcoat, scribbled seven digits in scrawling hand across a napkin, and handed it to Levi. Levi looked at it for a moment before plucking it from the table, folding it carefully into a neat square, and pocketing it. He had no intention of calling it. Not now, and not ever.

* * *

The chilly wind whipped through his thin nightclothes as Levi stood on the balcony of his apartment in the Mission district, hands clasped firmly around the metal railing as he looked down the street, the neon lights of late nights dancing across his vision.

How was it possible, how was it even conceivable, to feel so alone among a million people?

He went back inside, rubbing the chill away from his skin, and picked up the phone. The grey numbers on the softly glowing buttons had all but rubbed away, the two, seven, five, one, three all but illegible from how many times Levi had dialed the numbers. He did so now, more out of a force of habit than anything, listened to the comforting ring resonating calmly through his ears.

Much to his surprise, someone answered.

"Hello?" A voice, groggy with sleep. Deep. Masculine. Not Farlan.

"Farlan?" he asked, tentatively, holding his breath. "Is that you?" His voice held a note of fear, a note of hope.

"No, sorry," the voice replied. "You've gotten the wrong number." With a polite click, the line was disconnected, and Levi was left standing in the middle of his dark bedroom, the screen of the phone washing his hands in a soft green light. He was certain he hadn't dialed the number incorrectly; it was one that he could input in his sleep, one that he could rattle off the top of his head forwards and backwards.

If there hadn't been adequate proof before, this was certainly it. Farlan, and all the messages he'd left him, had disappeared into the vast network of cyberspace, dissipating unreturned and unrequited tears and hopes and wishes into the atmosphere.

Levi took a deep breath. Another. A bloom of anger, an emotion he hadn't felt in a long time, welled up from his chest, and before he could stop himself, he was flinging open the door to the balcony and running up to the railing. The fingers of his free hand curled around the icy metal, an unconscious attempt by his body to save itself, pulling his soul back to salvation.

The cordless was not quite so lucky, and even as Levi watched, already mortified by his actions, his fingers unpeeled from the hard plastic casing and let the telephone fall. He leaned over the railing, fingers clutched tight to safety, watching its descent until it shattered on the sidewalk in an explosion of plastic pieces.

He stood there for so long, his fingers slowly going numb from the death grip they had on the metal, until he could hear his thoughts again over the blood rushing through his head.

Levi slid the balcony door closed behind him, shivering, and he plucked his jacket from where he'd dropped it on the edge of the bed, stuffing his arms into the sleeves and zippering it up over his nightshirt. If he tried, truly tried, and with a little bit of help from his imagination, he could pretend the warmth came from Farlan's arms, wrapping tightly around him, tightly, tightly -

**Too tight.**

Levi unzipped the jacket quickly, wriggling out of it and letting it puddle on the floor in a pool of black before slithering under the bedcovers and shuddering as he tried to warm himself up.

* * *

In the morning, on his way to the bathroom to brush his teeth, Levi's foot came in contact with an unfamiliar texture. Taking a step back, he looked down to see a tiny square of crumpled up napkin, half-hidden beneath one of the jacket's sleeves.

Unfolding it, and scrutinizing the digits written in messy scrawl across it, Levi wondered what Erwin might have to say about last night's actions. He'd probably think Levi was crazy. Insane. Mad.

Dialing that number would be something an insane person would do. Levi had no doubt about it.

* * *

Erwin had just made his third cup of coffee when his mobile rang, nearly vibrating itself off the kitchen counter. An unfamiliar number was displayed across the screen, and Erwin prayed that whoever was on the other end wouldn't spend time trying to sell him an upside down potato peeler or something of the sort. He was often too polite to just hang up on people like that, something which Mike had had much amusement teasing him about.

"Hello?" he asked.

* * *

The voice was deep. Masculine. Not Farlan's.

Levi took a deep breath, his fingers wrapped around the smooth plastic casing of the mobile he'd bought that morning from the Apple store.

"Hello," he said. A trace of fear. A dash of hope. "This is Levi."


	6. Burning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by TwistedK, thanks honey bunches of oats~

Erwin had been more than happy to hear from him, barely concealed excitement over the telephone wires in a manner that Levi was unfamiliar with. He had invited Levi over for a visit, and Levi had acquiesced, surrendering to the genuine delight he could hear in Erwin's tone, staticky though it might have been. It was a change, it was pleasant to listen to the undercurrent of Erwin's syllables, instead of dreading the next words that would come out of his mouth: unwanted and unexpected and unneeded.

Levi sat across from Erwin at his granite kitchen table, looking vaguely amused as Erwin scrabbled to clean up the debris left from an apparent fit of inspiration he'd had "right before Levi came over." Levi watched in vague amusement as scraps of paper, covered in an illegible scrawl, were shoved unceremoniously into a beige folder that was already overflowing with other such scraps.

"Sorry," Erwin said, smiling as he finally set the folder away into a drawer, running hands through already tousled hair, streaks of molten gold in the weak sunlight of early afternoon. "I've been having a rough time with my latest work. Agent's on my case all the time, so you can imagine it's probably for the best if I can write as much as possible when I can think of anything halfway decent."

Levi nodded, although he had next to no clue about the writing process, about what writers actually did other than drink copious cups of coffee at Starbucks and tap away frantically at their laptops. It was a portrait depicted through movies and television shows, degrees of separation through the LCD screens that he turned on sometimes at home, setting the volume low so that he didn't feel quite so alone.

"And I'll be honest with you," Erwin said as he pulled out a chair, sat down across from Levi. He looked Levi in the eye, gaze steady, focused, giving Levi his full attention, and Levi shivered in the spotlight of Erwin's consideration. He was sure that he was far from deserving of it. "I didn't expect you to call me so soon, or at all, I suppose. I hoped you would, but hope only goes so far."

Levi studied him across the table, eyes drinking in the sight. Remembering. Erwin was still just as lovely as he had been that night, the one that was irrevocably scarred into the forefront of Levi's memory, the one that he always drew up when he was feeling particularly masochistic. 

 _Cheater,_ his mind whispered to him on dark, lonely nights where he curled up on his side of the mattress, shivering in the cold. _How could you do that? How could you? Who_ are _you?_

He had been helpless, indulging in a moment of weakness, tossing caution to the winds, clinging to Erwin to anchor him back to this universe.

And then, that soft nagging voice in the back of his mind. _Helpless? Wanting, wanton._  

The voice diverged into Farlan's deeper, huskier tones, the way his voice got after a few drinks, tumblers of whiskey or gin, acerbic and bitter when he pressed drunken kisses to Levi's mouth, forcing his way inside. 

 _You n_ _ee_ _d me, Levi, and don't you dare forget it. You are nothing without me._ Voice escalating into a shout, glass shattered against the walls of Levi's heart. _Nothing! Don't you dare look away._  

"What's on your mind?" Erwin asked, his voice, deep, deeper, cutting through his thoughts. Erwin was looking at him across the table, eyebrow arched, perplexed. Crystal eyes clear and sober and all sorts of chilling as they probed at the walls Levi had erected around himself over the years, tendrils of his gaze searching for breaches in his armor. 

"Nothing," Levi replied, quickly. Too quickly.

Erwin shrugged, holding palms up in surrender, a gesture which Levi appreciated. The tendrils retreated, leaving him unscathed and whole, unbroken. He collected up the shards of his thoughts quickly, assembled himself into a facade, well-worn and well meaning, but for the first time since Farlan had left, Levi felt exposed, see through, burning crystal clear beneath Erwin's scrutiny.

"Coffee?" Erwin asked, more to fill the silence than anything. Clearly, the man in front of him had secrets of his own, gnawing deep away at his insides, and Erwin wasn't sure if he wanted to unleash those particular monsters just yet. A character was always better with some aura of mystery about them, a past that unraveled eloquent across the pages and time span of the novel. And yet. And yet...by the same token, Erwin wanted to know everything, wanted to catch Levi's gaze and hold it and watch as he divulged his secrets, delicate baubles that spun the plot together.

"Okay," Levi agreed, nodding. His hands were pressed flat against the granite table, Erwin noticed, fingers spread and splayed. Unnatural. Tense. I make him nervous, Erwin thought to himself as he pulled out coffee grounds, scooped them into a fresh filter. He continued to watch Levi out of the corner of his eye as he pulled out cream from the fridge, sugar from one of his kitchen cabinets. The coffee dripped into the pot, dark and refreshing and rich, and Erwin poured it into two porcelain mugs, placing one in front of Levi with the cream and sugar, which the other man pushed away. 

He took his coffee black, bitter on his tongue, and Erwin found himself watching the way Levi wrapped his hands slow and neat around the mug, lifting it up to blow steam from its surface and sip. It was deja vu and familiar and there was a nagging voice in the back of Erwin's mind, sweet temptation, the devil's whisper. _Ask him. Go on, do it. You have nothing to lose._

"We've...we've met before, haven't we?" Erwin asked, sitting down with his own cup of coffee, doctored with cream and sugar, beige and milky in his cup. Levi froze, cup halfway between his mouth and the table. "Levi, please. I need to know."

_I n_ _ee_ _d to know where you've b_ _ee_ _n, who you've b_ _ee_ _n with, what you've b_ _ee_ _n doing. Why? Because I care, because I love you._

Levi set his cup down on the granite, staring into its inky depths, palms burning against the porcelain as he struggled with himself.

_Tell the truth, now!_

The sharp memory had him wincing, had him instinctively wanting to cover his ears and apologize, to beg for forgiveness.

"Yes," he whispered, to the memory and to Erwin, who was regarding him with a puzzled look now. "Yes."

He pushed away his coffee, half-finished, stood up. The chair squealed against the flooring, a rough, nasty sound that had him half lifting his arms to protect his face from certain retribution. 

Farlan had always been prone to particularly nasty hangovers, migraines that struck the instant he woke up and refused to abate no matter how many cups of coffee he drank or how many aspirin he swallowed dry and bitter against his tongue. Levi had spent his days tiptoeing around, speaking in whispers, afraid and startling at the slightest noise. Farlan was flawed, too, and Levi had been so sure that he didn't need the additional burden that Levi represented. 

"Levi, wait." Erwin's voice was calm even as he stood, and for the first time, Levi became aware of just how much taller the other man was. A solid half-foot and then some of space separated them, and he felt dizzy, sick with fear and desperation. "Calm down."

"I have to go," he whispered, his words falling, slipping, tripping over each other. His pulse raced quicksilver in his ears, his heart threatening to burst out of his chest, and he was afraid Erwin could hear it, could hear the lie in his voice, could see his untruths and his unworthiness in his eyes as he pushed past him, heading for the door.

* * *

 

Erwin reached out, grasped Levi's wrist. It was smooth and sweet and delicate, porcelain, beneath his fingers, and he wasn't gripping particularly hard, but Levi jerked away as though burned.

The sleeve of his jacket rode up an inch, a sliver, and Erwin found confirmation in the silver smooth skin lined in neat, concentric circles across Levi's wrist, following the pulsing river of his veins. They were perfectly aligned, a constellation, spherical and planned.

 _Cheaters_ , the voice in the back of Erwin's mind whispered. And then, a whirlwind of thoughts directed toward Levi. _How could you do that? How could you let that happen to you? Who are you?_  

Levi tugged away, abruptly, brusquely, yanking the cuff of his jacket's sleeve back down to brush the heel of his hand. His lips were pressed tight together, white at the centers feathering to a barely there pink, and Erwin was fascinated at the set of emotions flickering behind charcoal eyes. 

Fear. Uncertainty. A plea to be left alone, and a scream to be saved.

* * *

 

Levi's steps were loud even to his own ears, as he all but ran down the front hallway of Erwin's home, scolding himself for his stupidity and begging Farlan for his forgiveness, wherever he was, by turns.

 _I do not deserve him,_ Levi thought, breathless as he tugged open the front door unceremoniously and fled. His mind barely had time to register the conspicuous absence of the wrought iron silver of picture frames in the living room, barely had time to analyze what that might mean. 

Erwin let him go, watching Levi's retreating silhouette from his front window, growing smaller along the sidewalk. He sighed, tugging the curtains closed again, heading back to the kitchen table where the cups of coffee, one milky, one dark, were rapidly growing cold. 

It was a start, at least, a frenzied beginning to their connection to each other, tentative as it might have been. Erwin was certain Levi would be back; he had had the bravery, the initiative, to take the first steps into establishing furthered, planned communication. Erwin tossed the remains of the coffee into the sink, watching it burble brown down the drain, before pulling out the folder he'd so unceremoniously shoved into a drawer at Levi's arrival. Scraps fluttered out around his hands as he opened it, words, words, words everywhere. And yet, they meant nothing, Erwin thought viciously to himself as he crumpled paper after paper. None of these descriptions would do, none of these plots and progression points made sense given the information he had just learned.

And certainly Erwin had written enough depressing stories for a lifetime. Certainly the protagonist deserved a happy ending at least once. He sighed as he stalked back to his bedroom, flicked open his laptop, and deleted the sloppy, rutting process of his newest work entirely. 

Fortunately, Erwin Smith was good at beginnings, and he sat down at his desk, almost excited, the words beginning to make their ways slowly to the tips of his fingers.

* * *

It wasn't until Levi was safely ensconced back in his apartment in the Mission district that he allowed himself to relax. His heartbeat slowed, softer, gentler, until he remembered the transgressions, the crimes, the sins he'd committed, and he found himself sobbing, wild, desperate, wounded sorts of sounds that were almost inhuman in their intensity. Surely Farlan wouldn't want him back, now, because he was tainted, impure, surely, surely he was unworthy.

 _I do not deserve him,_ Levi thought to himself as he cradled himself tight together, hands locked around the sockets of his shoulders as he tried to forget the way Erwin had looked at him. Not wanting, not wanton. Wanted. Needed. Deserving of his attention.

I do not deserve him, trying to forget the night Farlan had stormed home, drunk and staggering, pressing the cherry of his cigarette into the fine skin of Levi's wrist because he needed to be reminded of who he belonged to. 

 _I do not deserve him._ Levi fell asleep with the words etching themselves into his mind, but his thoughts refused to disclose exactly who Levi did not deserve.


	7. Paralysis

Thoughts raced frantic, fervent, through Levi's mind as he tried to fall asleep that night, arms snugged tight around himself because it was one of those nights where the mattress felt like an ocean and he needed to hold himself together for fear of shattering apart. This, and the fact that no one else would. No one else could, not anymore, and, truthfully, he didn't miss the stale taste that clung to the collars of Farlan's shirts whenever he came back late at night.

The weight of the memories crept in, encroaching, squeezing against every hard-fought breath that rattled quicksilver against his rib cage. It startled him with its crush and the inevitable pressure of remembering.

 _Love in books wasn't like this_ , he thought to himself as he pressed a contemplative kiss to the cigarette burns on his wrist and forearm: an indelible reminder of what his life was. The skin was silver smooth against his lips.

_What had his life been?_

The question snuck in when he wasn't paying attention, crept around his barricades when he dared to let his defenses down for even a moment. It had the audacity to strike itself into his mind, the hammers of the typewriter banging out loud in his brain as the idea carved itself into the pages of his thoughts. Every syllable screamed of blasphemy. Levi held his breath, waiting and watching with thudding heart, ready to be smote down for his treasonous thoughts.

It didn't come; the lightning bolts and thunder held their peace. Levi exhaled, breath a slipstream of soft anguish against the pillows. Relief. The covers smelled like fresh linen, citrus, the soft scent of rain after a long dry spell, and there was no sharp tang of spilt whiskey seeping from pores on sweaty skin, no suffocating cigarette smoke to mar the pillow cases with their acrid ash. It was unnerving, how used to it he'd gotten, how accustomed he'd been to the overpowering scent of Farlan's love.

Doors banging open and shut in the early hours of the morning, swimming up into barely wakeful consciousness before the acidity of alcohol wove its way into his fading dreams and stuttered him out of slumber. Holding his breath, lying immobile, and praying with every heartbeat that Farlan would let him be.  

It wasn't a way to live, tiptoeing around the edges of the bad moments and waiting out the deluge for the sun to appear again. But the sun was intoxicating, tasting sweet and lovely and pure against Levi's skin, and when Farlan no longer smelled like alcohol, when he didn't slam doors and grip at Levi's wrists with hands tender as manacles, they worked beautifully together. It made waiting for the sun feel alright, acceptable, comfortable even, and Levi had grown used to weathering out the storms.  


He burrowed his face in the pillows. It didn't smell like home, not quite. Farlan was fading away with every slow staccato breath that eased Levi further into his dreams with a gentle hand. It didn't smell like home, but it was quiet, utter peaceful serenity, and Levi's arms slackened around himself as he fell asleep with the smallest vestiges of a smile creeping across his lips.

* * *

 

Pages clicked out beneath his fingertips, scrolling across the soft pulsing glow of his laptop screen. Erwin lifted Levi, hoisted him up onto a pedestal of words and typeface and serifs, spinning a story of him, around him, for him. 

The burns had been intentional, silver smooth against his thumb when he'd brushed over them. He wondered vaguely if they still hurt Levi sometimes, if he still pressed his mouth against the burns, slick tattoos against his lips. Did he look at them when he showered and think about the person who'd left them? Did he cover up the circles with soap suds and pretend, for at least a few blissful moments, that they would be washed off with the rest of the dirt? 

A brief image skittered through his mind. Levi, the cherry of a cigarette glowing between his fingertips, pressing ashes to pale milky skin and watching it blister, swollen, beneath his ministrations.

No. He shook the thought away. That wasn't quite right, it jarred with the persona he'd developed for Levi already, both the character and the man.  


He was frailty, unsure, unsteady, but the fragility wrapped itself carefully around a core of steel, the beginnings of a person, the start of someone who had begun to realize that they finally mattered, and Erwin hoped that he might one day have the honor of meeting that person.

He grimaced at his character profile document for his protagonist, Levi and not Levi, his eyes aching from the long hours spent in front of the screen. It hadn't been like this since Mike left, the words flowing unstopped across the blank Word document and covering it with concepts and thoughts and the person Erwin thought Levi might be, the person Erwin hoped Levi might one day turn into, dizzy with choices and possibilities, intoxicated with the freedom to let the shell of fragility dissolve. He wanted to let Levi's colors bleed all over the pages of his story, needed him to stain them with dark unapologetic clarets and viridians, if for nothing else as proof that he existed and would leave some sort of mark on the future.  


But Levi, the real Levi who was probably sleeping only a few miles away, had to do that for himself, too. He had to realize and accept the fact that maybe there was a gap between the person he was and the person he could be and toe the line between the two, erase it so they bled into each other. 

Erwin rolled his head on his shoulders, easing out the kinks and knots of tension that had worked themselves into the pockets of his neck. The ideas and words bounced around in his head, the protagonist of his story talking in a soft susurrus about how he didn't want to kill himself. No. Definitely not. He just wanted to sleep for a very, very long time. Possibly forever. Or, at the very least, until it was all over.

Setting: Home. A counselor's chair, the leather squeaky beneath his jeans and his palms, trapped beneath his thighs, sweaty with worry as the psychiatrist peered at him over half-moon spectacles and jotted a few notes down on a clipboard. The main character would try to crane his head to see what she was writing, but the scrawl would be illegible. He would settle back into his chair, nervous, and try to decide what information was relevant. All of it? None of it?

Time Frame: Weeks. Months. Years. Erwin wanted to know him inside and out, wanted to show him that it was okay to be not okay. 

Title? Erwin wasn't in the habit of naming his books before he finished them, but 'Elysium' didn't sound half bad anymore. Perfect happiness. The nirvana of finding oneself again.

It was a fitting title, and he named the Word document "Elysium_main" before saving it and clicking his laptop closed for the night.


	8. Poison

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Betaed by TwistedK, the darling~

The story got out of hand, letters and syllables crawling rough and vigorous out of Erwin's cupped palms to splash, a waterfall, across the pages. The words burbled out of the tips of his fingers, a thought, a breath, and suddenly they appeared, wild and fierce and serifed, demanding asylum in the margins of the document, and Erwin was powerless to resist the riptide of the sentences come to carry him clean away in their current.  


The pages scrolled down the screen, spaced in one point five, twelve point Garamond filling the margins left to right with their inky ilk. It was unlike any story Erwin had told before, unlike any book sitting glossy and hardbound on his bookshelves, bearing his name in bold silver font. It grew by itself, rearing its devastatingly gorgeous head to consume Erwin's every waking hour, like kudzu across his thoughts.

Levi consumed him, and he jumped at every chime of his mobile phone, praying that every scattering of numbers would lead back to Levi's voice over the telephone wires. He was bubbling over with excitement, aching to talk about Levi, aching to talk with Levi, and every passing day drew out more paragraphs, which grew into pages, which grew into chapters.

And yet.

Levi was the only person he wanted to discuss Levi with, but he was somewhere else in the universe, somewhere far away beyond the reaches of time and space, and Erwin found himself scouring the city blocks with his eyes every time he stepped outside, praying for a glance. Every silhouette became him, every creeping shadow in the corners of trash-riddled alleyways bore his name with silken whispers.

He wondered if his footsteps were tracing Levi's across the cracked sidewalks. Wondered if it was maybe the other way around instead, drawing wide looping circles around the other's insteps like needles skipping over the vinyl of a record. Would Levi have dipped into this convenience store for a second, a breath, pressing himself up against the cool fingerprint-smudged glass of the drinks case? Would he have leaned his head back against the display at midnight, features cast orange and green in the bright sickly neon of the OPEN sign? Would he have caught his lower lip between his teeth, gnawing it chapped and bloody as he tried to steady himself for the long, reluctant journey home? Erwin imagined so, could almost trace Levi's outline against the glass as he slid the door open, cold chilled fingertips, for a bottle of iced tea as ammunition against the muggy spring warmth.

_[[In a recent page of Elysium_main, the protagonist had flung himself angrily into the squeaky leather recliner of his psychiatrist's office, the heels of his hands pressing roughly into his eyes, there, not there, barely just._

_"I've done it again," he had whispered, his words shaking apart between the gaps in his fingers to fall heavy on the carpet, where the edges of their indented serifs made no sound. Meaningless. Weightless. "What's wrong with me?"_

_The psychiatrist had looked at him over her half-moon spectacles, her fountain pen tapping lightly against the yellow spread of a legal notepad, a Morse code of judgment._

_"Elaborate," she had said, crisp. Cool. Clinical. The main character had sighed, his hands and the scales dropping from his eyes into his lap, fingers knotting together, twisting, uncomfortable._

_He had taken a deep breath, cleared his throat, preparing his tongue to receive the bitter taste of confession._

_"I still dream about him."]]_

Erwin was sure about this, was certain that Levi still carried around the taste of someone's name, rolling it like bittersweet candy against his tongue, addicted to the poison taste, killing himself with every suck.   


Then he'd gotten stuck, had been given pause at what came next.

He sipped at his iced tea on a bench at Fisherman's Wharf, the scent of brine and kelp gleaming warm in the late spring sunshine. The sea lions were yelping at each other, gleeful tails slapping against the water and the seaweed-covered planks bobbing in the bay. Children laughed freely, clutching at their parents' knees and darting out to place dollar bills and quarters in street performers' hats and outstretched hands.   
  
Had Levi come here, Erwin wondered, profile lit up milky at night from the soft golden lights embedded in the pier's planks? Had he sat, wedging himself careful and secure against a post of wood, letting his legs dangle over the edge, the cherry of a cigarette gleaming between his fingertips as he blew galaxies into the night air?

Would he smoke, after that, burning constellations into his arm? Would he smoke _because_ of that, to remember how it had felt to become glorious infinite stardust and syzygy even for just a few agonizing moments?

Erwin had questions upon questions, and he took another sip of his lemon iced tea, holding the flavor in his mouth as he ignored his agent's telephone call, the third one of the morning. They had been coming, increasingly frantic, voicemails pleading, then asking, then demanding to know whether or not he had the ideas for a novel yet.

He had more than an idea, but he wasn't sure he wanted to share Levi with anyone just yet.

* * *

 

Levi slid open the glass door case, cold chilled fingertips leaving smudges on the surface as he reached inside the drinks case for a bottle of iced tea. His hand paused for a moment. Lemon or raspberry? A moment passed, two, three.

Farlan loved raspberry - tea, lemonade, candies that had Levi almost wincing against the gritty saccharine.

His hand drifted to the left, plucking a Lipton lemon iced tea out of its holder, and slotting it into his shopping basket, small victories. 

 As he left the store, exulting in the sweet sour taste against his tongue, Levi had a vague urge to call Erwin. It would be easy, laughably simple, to reach into his pocket for the cool weight of the phone, only one number stored; easy, laughably simple, to tap his fingers across the screen and inform him that he thought that, maybe, just maybe, he was starting to figure himself out.

Yes. Perhaps he could do that.

Tiny triumphs.

* * *

 

The protagonist of Elysium didn't yet have a name. Calling him Levi felt too personal, felt too presumptuous, and yet.   


Levi. Joined in harmony. The past soul meeting the present's spirit, and finding its oncoming transformation glorious.

It was fitting, almost irritatingly so, and Erwin longed to fill paragraphs and pages with Levi, Levi, Levi, the four letters scrolling down into infinity, sweet and mellifluous on his tongue.

His phone buzzed again in his pocket. He sighed in irritation, twisting the cap of the iced tea back on, tightly, the plastic ridges scraping into his fingers.

An unfamiliar number flashed on the screen, a no named caller still struggling to figure themselves out, and Erwin's breath caught in his throat before he was hastening to answer it, savoring the sibilance of every syllable as Levi said hello, again.   


 


	9. Freezing

[["Granted, I love you. And, granted, I know that the opposite is not true. Am I a fool for it? Probably. But allow me to be intoxicated just this little bit longer; the burning vodka of your violent love melts the freeze better than any tender caresses."]]

Love ran broken, sharp, through the Levi in the pages, silent syllables lost in the mire of the clinical white pages on Erwin’s laptop. Sighing, Erwin deleted a sentence, a paragraph, a page, out of existence, and turned his attention back to the Levi who was sitting across from him at the kitchen table. 

"Am I bothering you?" Guilt, broken, sharp, the people who are forever apologizing because they've led their whole lives holding fault an albatross around their necks. 

"No, not at all," he hastened to reassure Levi, clicking the laptop closed and folding his hands together on the table. "It's just..." His words failed him, fell flat, the weight of their fantasy and emotion dragging them down. "I've got so much to say." He laughed, a bit self-consciously. "I'm not sure where to start." 

Silence fell gentle between them, a soft coating of comfort, and Erwin allowed his gaze to roam over Levi, quiet appraisals. He was wearing a scoop-necked sweater, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows as an acknowledgment to the surprisingly balmy weather outside. His hands, fingers slim supple strong, were wrapped around a mug of coffee that he was letting steam into the air in slippery coils of white. He was wearing his burns in the open, and Erwin admired him for it, defiance and courage cloaked in subtlety. He only hoped the Levi encased in the letters would be brave enough to wear his heart on his sleeve one unthinkable sentence, one unthinkable chapter, one unthinkable arc from now. 

"You could start at the beginning." Levi's voice, silk and steel, was teasing, and Erwin looked him in theeye, stared into his soul and was comforted to find that the abyss was no longer lightless, a smile playing around the corners of Levi's mouth. "I want to know everything." 

* * *

 

After the first breathless Hello, again, Erwin had hardly been able to contain his excitement. Levi, his Levi - _his_? - in the flesh, voice staticky over the grainy connection, speaking, spinning out proofs and apologies and declarations that, yes, he wanted to see Erwin again. Apologizing for his rudeness, saying that he wanted to listen, when what he was really saying was that he wanted to be listened to, and Erwin was all ears. 

* * *

 

"I've been writing about you," he blurted out, the grace and finesse of his authorship fleeing in the face of Levi's naked realities. The words fell, broken, sharp, in between them, until Erwin could almost reach out and trace their jagged edges with a carefully extended fingertip. He wanted to take them back, reached out absentmindedly as though he could capture the syllables and master them beneath his palm. 

Levi's hand reached out, absentmindedly, to capture Erwin’s hand. A halfway point, a bridge between what was real and what was worded. 

"I want to knoweverything," Levi repeated, more firmly this time, looking Erwin straight in the eye now. It was intimacy, the way his words spilled out like stardust to coat the jagged edges of Erwin’s confession with satin, and Erwin was rendered breathless by the intensity glowing obsidian in Levi's eyes. "Who do you think I am?" He flipped Erwin’s hand over, tracing at the life lines scattering across his palm, and Erwin held his breath, the butterflies of Levi's fingertips scattering across his pulse. 

"I think you're lonely." The butterflies paused, pale flesh, dark hair fading into the dark satin sheets, fingers leaving bruises against his shoulder and salt against his tongue as he laved away half-remembered tears. "I think that when you love, you love too much and save none for yourself." 

Levi was silent, his lips pinched tightly together, and Erwin was sure he'd taken fluttering kisses from that mouth before, afraid to press too tightly for fear of brushing off the scales of deception and fragility. Afraid that there might be something more, afraid that there might be someone else. Afraid to pluck the wings of imagined freedom off only to discover that the only thing holding them back from flight was themselves. 

His words, once unstoppered, became a deluge, a torrent, a downpour. Levi's fingers were still against his palm, and Erwin took it bravely to heart that Levi hadn't flitted away just yet. 

"You've loved and you've lost and you've been hurt by both in equal measure." 

He grasped at Levi's wrist, fingers capturing slim supple strong wrist, the pad of his pinky brushing against the soft silvered skin of one burn, silky smooth. 

The Levi in his writing brushed his lips over the cuts on his arms, an outpouring of emotion into brutal physicality to convince himself there was a reason for his pain. Gorgeous, agonizing savagery, and Erwin wondered if the alcohol fueled haze of that night had allowed him to press kisses against the raw live wires of Levi's soul. What words had he whispered, rum murmurings into the seashell curve of Levi's ear? What promises had he made, what sweet nothings had he gasped, ecstasy broken sharp into infinity? 

Would Levi remember them? 

"But you think that maybe you might be able to love again. Beauty is tempered with pain, and you're" - he pressed his thumb gently against Levi's wrist, right up against a burn - "only all too aware of that."  

Levi's hand curled into a fist, fingers loose against his palm. The butterfly swelled into a sparrow, beak sharp and ready to peck, and Erwin calmed him, soothing with grains of compassion. 

"Please help me understand, Levi. Allow me to listen." 

He slid the closed laptop over to Levi's side of the table. He could almost make out his reflection, cream and ebony, in the silver coating. Levi's breath caught in his throat. 

"You want me to read it?" he asked, voice soft, disbelieving, his fingers loosening further. But the transformation had been there, the butterfly molting into a sparrow, and who knew how much farther Erwin could carry it, who knew how much farther Levi was willing to fly? Erwin could feel Levi's pulse against his thumb, mirroring his own, slow, steady, secure. 

"I would be honored if you would," Erwin replied. "I trust you." 

Levi swallowed, turning his face away, but not quickly enough for Erwin to miss the way obsidian intensity surrendered and gave way to a slurry of onyx gloss. Trust. Not easily given, but Erwin would readily put himself in the care of his slim supple strong hands.

* * *

 

At home, curled up on the couch with a cup of chai tea, Levi scrolled through the document on the desktop that Erwin had titled "Elysium_main." The folder bearing the same root was filled with different documents, scraps of dialogue, profile sketches, scenes that called to Levi like a half-remembered dream at the tip of his fingers. 

Trust. He sipped meditatively at his tea, rolling the cinnamon and star anise flavors around in his mouth. He was sure Erwin had the document backed up on other computers, on USB sticks, on CDs and the like, but it was intoxicating, burning freeze, to know that he trusted him enough for this. 

The protagonist in the story didn't have a name. He fluttered through the pages, starting scared, sobbing fears and hopes and dreams, and as the cursor scrolled frantic through the document, he metamorphosed, blossoming into his own strength again. It was enchanting, mesmerizing, and Levi felt almost distraught when the cursor refused to tick downwards any longer. 

"You aren't listening to me!" the protagonist had shouted at his therapist, a bright spark of anger reaching out a tiny flame. "Why won't you listen to me?" He had been screaming, shouting, shredding tissues into white films that sent dusty motes spiraling dizzy through the air. 

The scene had stopped there, and Levi was caught in limbo, breathless, afraid to know more and yet aching to read further. 

Listening? Yes. He closed the laptop with a small click, and sipped at the rapidly cooling tea. He was. 


	10. Breaking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> betaed by TwistedK, lovely jar of marmalade that she is~ Go check her out on AO3 also!

Levi studied the white painted oak of the door in front of him. A light mist spilled in from the bay, driven in on wet breezes that sneaked their way underneath the collar of his shirt to caress at his skin with damp fingers. The laptop was tucked away neatly inside his messenger bag, the weight of the words grounding him to the steps in front of Erwin’s house in Cow Hollow. Seagulls chanted, raucous caws, their silhouettes fluttering pages through the gloam. The number 42, raised gold, winked back at him from underneath the peephole, and Levi wondered if Erwin believed in finite universes. 

Was there a universe where his story with Farlan ended, a neat, clean cut from one arc to the next? What about a universe where his story with Erwin began, if there was surely to be one, tentative first words and opening lines spilling out into paragraphs and pages and chapters? Or did the universes intermingle, gleaming stardust and black holes weaving tightly? He had so many questions for Erwin, dancing cantatas on the tip of his tongue. 

 _I've known you_ , he wanted to say, the syllables like butterscotch candy tucked up high in the crevices of his cheeks. _And I want to get to know you better_ , melting caramel against his tongue. 

The potted plants on Erwin’s front porch were dying, the robust green of their leaves and stalks fading away into brittle brown leaves that spotted the soil with rapt decay. A soft gust of warm wind spilled in from the west to ruffle at Levi's hair, scattering the leaves around his shoes. Summer was coming, flowers blossoming rampant everywhere Levi looked - bouquets at the florist's, wrapped in crinkled cellophane, flowers arrayed neat and pretty blooms tucked in with each other in cradled rainbows. Dandelions and sweet clover in the parks, sweet smells with every step. The patch of wild violets growing up through the sidewalk cracks at the intersection of Van Ness and Geary, spatterings of purple along the grey. 

Levi made a note to perhaps bring Erwin flowers. Orchids? Azaleas? Snapdragons? He eyed the terra cotta pots. Perhaps cacti were more in order, then.  

He raised his hand to knock, three times, growing firmer with every rap. 

Erwin opened the door after a few moments, his eyes brightening, crinkling curved commas, cerulean like the ocean in the summertime. Happy to see him, and, like sunflowers, Levi turned toward the warmth. Slowly, tentatively, centimeters and inches to match the quivering rotation of his heart. 

* * *

 

"What did you think?" Erwin was practically vibrating with excitement, and Levi bit at the inside of his cheek to stifle a laugh. Oh? Laughter? Happiness free from temperance with sudden whiplash recriminations, feelings given freely away? It was almost overwhelming, almost intoxicating, and it sent Levi's head reeling. "Did you like it?" 

He picked up the cup of coffee Erwin had set in front of him, bitter and black against his tongue. Erwin had remembered, setting the porcelain cup down in front of Levi with barely a clink,. The dark roast coated his mouth with richness. The heat flooded in, chinks and cracks in fragile armor, and Levi's soul rejoiced in the lovely warmth against patches gone too long untended. 

"I did," he murmured, words barely making a ripple across the deep brown of the coffee. "I enjoyed it very much."

The words were falling flat, he could feel it sinking to the bottom of the sludge like sugar cubes, waiting to dissolve with a nudge and a stir of faith. They weren't enough, didn't come close to explaining what he wanted to say. "I'm not very good at this . You'll have to give me a moment." 

He flinched away from his demand, the coffee burning against his tongue. Erwin didn't have to do anything, he wasn't obligated to do anything.  Who did Levi think he was anyway - 

"No, it's all right. Please take your time." 

Cooling against his lips, Erwin’s words were aloe to soothe away the burn. Levi's eyes flickered up to Erwin. He was studying Levi intently, curiously, bright blue eyes rapt, the clearest windows that promised summer skies ahead. He had painted Levi throughout his novel, building up in modicums of grey. Bland, monochrome, one-dimensional. But the etchings were perfect, every syllable of every word frightening in its clarity, and he had stopped at a point in the novel where Levi was sure the artist had gotten frustrated, desperate to spatter the canvas with streaks of color. Aquamarine, scarlet, viridian, every shade of the rainbow. 

"Why doesn't he have a name?" 

The question spilt out like a toppled bottle of ink across pristine lines on a page of their conversation, unintentional but the words refused to be contained any longer, and he was stunned by his own audacity. Erwin’s eyes widened for a moment, and Levi was sure that he'd made a misstep, that he'd made a mistake. He longed to retract the words, longed to shove them back sternly behind his teeth and tell them firmly that under no circumstances were they to escape, not even if they shattered the enamel and pounded at the insides of his lips. 

"The name doesn't matter." Of course it didn't. Levi wanted to curse himself for his foolishness. "It doesn't matter when it's about you. Admittedly," Erwin paused here, running a hand through his hair. It fell in smooth strands of cornsilk under his fingers, parting its gleaming way to his will. "I was going to name him Levi. But it wouldn't be right if it's not you."

A pause.

" _Is_ it you?" 

The protagonist in the book had had his crimson moments pinpricking furious through the silk of grey that enveloped the language. It offered a stunning clarity, a glimpse at something more, the hint of a sea of poppies on stormy water. The character had a depth that Levi felt sure that he himself was lacking, regretful, regrettable. He ached for the color to leach back in, and found himself rendered breathless by the thought that perhaps there had never been any paint to begin with. He waited, patient, an unstained palette, hands folding neatly in his lap, waiting for his parents, waiting for Farlan, waiting for Erwin to tell him who he was. 

His answer surprised him. "Yes. No."

He braced himself for retribution, the scorned artist in agony about the insults against his creation. The silence that followed was brutal. A raised hand, a shout, the shattering of china tinkling against the kitchen tiles. He knew how to deal with those, curling up into some dark place in himself to soothe away the blows. But silence, a lack of response? It was new, unfamiliar, breaking him away. 

But Erwin, as though he knew, understood and even welcomed Levi's doubt, smiled with something that looked frighteningly like relief. Levi was unbuoyed, floating in the open ocean without a paddle, confused and holding his breath.

"I'm so glad," Erwin breathed, words breathing through him. He flicked open his laptop and ran a tender eye over the document Levi had left open. The creator fired up his kiln again, ready to add, fingers poised over the keys to capture Levi's every sentence. To embellish, to embroider, to weave forth a tapestry. Paint dripped thick, rich, luxurious in waxy spirals that stained at Levi's fingertips.

"Please. Tell me everything." 

Levi took a deep breath, and embraced the iridescence, blossoming with every word. 

 


	11. Repairs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Betaed by TwistedK, the sweetest little mackerel in the sea

It began like that, sitting across from each other at Erwin’s mahogany kitchen table, the soft tapping of the laptop’s keys an interspersed staccato to Levi’s stuttering words. Levi gave himself away in crumbs, in pieces, in fractions, the halting stop and start of his words filling the room with a story spinning itself gossamer across the pages.

A man loved, and a man lost. Levi cradled the mug of rapidly cooling coffee in front of him. Erwin waited resolutely, his fingers poised over the black keys, his silence woven through with patience.

“His name was Farlan.” Ah, Farlan, the man who had shaken Levi with his very absence, a silhouette with its face pressed reluctantly along the thin glass in the airport terminal, waiting for retribution.

The seconds ticked by, stretching into minutes, spilling into hours. The Keurig grinded out tall mugs of French roast, spitting out the dark brew as the milky sunlight crept hesitantly across the floor.

“I love –“ A pause, a hesitation, an untruth holding its breath and waiting to be thrust into the daylight. “I loved him very much?” Levi’s voice tilted up at the end like a question mark, and answers upon answers leapt to the tip of Erwin’s tongue.

Of course you did, he wanted to say. When your world was doused in darkness, he flickered for a moment like a beacon of hope and you reached out to it without knowing that fire might burn. Of course you loved. But inferences could only take one so far, and he was determined to be true to Levi, to listen and capture the veritas of every word.

“Sorry,” Levi murmured. He was staring down into his coffee cup, searching for an answer in the chocolate ripples of his reflection. “I don’t have a lot to say.”

Erwin had only added one bullet point to his character outline of the protagonist who might be Levi. A) wants to love again (?)  Even this was questionable; perhaps this Farlan had spoilt Levi for love, his brand of affection scorching through barren fields and setting the grain ablaze until it burnt itself out in weary puffs of ash.

And yet, Erwin wanted to believe in the possibility of a happy ending, if only Levi would be willing to take his hand and guide him to one.

He was remembering more and more of the night after KnockOut. Kisses laden with alcohol, the plush pillow of a lower lip plump beneath his nibbles, biting for askance, fingers woven through his hair tight and clinging as though afraid to let go and be swept away into the sea. Levi had been crying, the salt tang of tears bittersweet against his tongue, Erwin’s voice, disjointed even in his memories, asking him if he was alright. But what had he said after that? Erwin frowned, trying to remember, but the grey fog of remembrance refused to lift any farther for the present moment.   

Levi was fidgeting across the table from him, stroking at the burns on the inside of his wrist with an absentminded thumb that pressed into the skin lightly with every pass. His gaze was focused somewhere in the middle of the table, lost in fascination with the knots on the wood. Erwin saved the document with a decisive tap before closing the laptop and pushing it to the side, folding his hands into each other on the table. Only time and tenderness could wear down the fragile shell Levi had built around himself, and Erwin had no intention of forcing his hand any time soon, deadlines and frantic phone calls from his agent be damned.

“Would you like to go out? It’s getting a bit cramped in here” he murmured, gratified to see Levi’s eyes flicker up towards his, glancing briefly in contact before flitting away again. Eager to escape, to be anywhere where the weight of memory couldn’t gather and bunch up claustrophobic in the corners of the room. “I mean, if you want to, of course.”

* * *

 

The used books shop carried the smell of weathering paper and crisp paint with it, the soft scents of ginger tea on a rainy day, and Erwin watched as Levi rifled through the pages of books he pulled down from the shelves. He cradled the spines in the palms of his hands, cracked and weather worn and lovingly taped back together.

He had been quiet the whole car ride over, curling in on himself in the passenger seat of Erwin’s Toyota, tucking his face into the collar of his Burberry coat and staring out the window at the chipped storefronts and brightly dressed pedestrians passing by. Erwin had let the silence stretch out silky between them, reveling in the soft melody of his thoughts. The words that he normally would have fought to conjure up to dispel the uneasy silences with Mike were unnecessary, unwanted now even, and he relished the feeling of being alone, together, in a crowded room.

He had looked over at Levi during a brief interlude at a stoplight, surprised when he’d met the other man’s gaze. Levi had blinked, a quick fluttering of his eyelashes, before he dropped his eyes back to his lap. There had been curiosity, interest, wonder wrapped up in stormy seas, the man Levi had used to be spilling through like the sun peeping out for a brief moment from behind the clouds. Erwin wanted to tease him out of hiding, reassure him that he was beautiful swathed in light.

He looked like that now, glowing, eyes rapt as they flicked across the lines of text, yellow paper and spattered ink beneath his fingertips. Selfless hands turned greedy, pulling books out and reshelving them, fingers running hungry over the pages and the sloppy penciled annotations of previous owners, devouring every word. Utter, consuming fascination, and Erwin was entranced by the white-hot fury of Levi’s passion. 

Turning to place a book reverently back on the shelf, Levi caught Erwin’s eye. Fire sizzled down, glowing back into embers, doused with what? Shame? Embarrassment? Guilt?

“Sorry,” Levi murmured, his voice low, his hands falling back to his sides. “I’m sure you’ve got other things to do today.”

Erwin shrugged, sitting down on one of the stools scattered indiscriminately throughout the aisles. He leaned back gently, the ladder of the stacks pressing comfortingly against his shoulders. “Not at all,” he replied. “I love reading, too.” He was rewarded with a small, hesitant smile, an affirmation, a chink of sunshine.

Levi pulled up a stool across from him, head bent over a book. Erwin could trace the words from the silent movement of Levi’s lips. 

Chapter I. Single. He revised his document in his head, eyes absentmindedly raking over Levi’s frame, hunched around the plot. A boy, a teenager, a young man fed on words and syllables from another world without realizing that perhaps the ones at his disposal were no less worthy, that he was no less worthy than the fictional characters he befriended.  

“The typed serifs raised him, and caressed his dreams with pleasantries.” It had a nice ring to it, and Erwin committed the sentence to memory.


	12. Thaw

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta by twistedkit, a cherubic cherry lollipop

Erwin hadn’t yet responded to Levi’s text message, the words still gleaming obsidian in their little grey bubble on his screen, inviting him over for a cup of coffee. He’d been about to text Levi himself, a greeting, a hesitant hello, the meeting went well, how are you, his fingers poised over the keyboard on the touch screen, when the little grey ellipses had popped up. He’d stayed his hand, watched with rapt eyes and bated breath as Levi typed something, deleted it, typed, deleted.

 

* * *

 

_Typed. Deleted._

_Uncertainty screamed its restless way over the telephone wires, but patience made its wishes known, loud and fervent. But the wishing well was running dry, the water evaporating in search of better days, and the coins clinked to the bottom. The ellipses disappeared, and a moment later, Erwin carried Levi’s words in the palm of his hand._

_“How’s the writing going?” Innocuous enough, perfectly punctuated, but when the screen of their conversation was highlighted with blue, the little grey sentences were an uplifting, refreshing contrast, the solid stability of icebergs in a sea whose swells tried to give and take in equal measure._

_“Well enough. I’ve got a meeting with my editor later today to talk about it,” he’d replied, breathless with anticipation as the little Read receipt popped up beneath his message. He had run a hand through his already-tousled hair, working his way through his second slice of toast, crumbs scattering across his lap. The winds of spring were ushering in warmth, winds to drive away the fog, and the kitchen windows had been propped open, gauzy white curtains billowing to catch the breeze._

_Levi had typed. Deleted. Typed again, every syllable a struggle and every well-gotten word a triumph. The sun flickered out from behind the clouds, peeping out blushing heat to stain the pavement with its golden gleam._

_In the end, it had only been two words. “Good luck.” Wishes caught in limbo, spilled out of the curve of Levi’s palm into the darkness, and Erwin imagined the other man breathless, straining his ears to try and hear the splash below._

_“Thanks.”_

* * *

 

_His editor had been much more verbose, frowning over the preliminary manuscripts Erwin had sent over through email. He was a short, clerical-looking man who spent most of their meetings readjusting his round wire-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose, and then promptly wrinkling his nose down at the manuscripts in front of him as though they’d caused him personal offense. Currently, Erwin’s script and variations thereof littered every inch of the mahogany desk between them, and it was heart-wrenching to see the pages dog-eared, entire passages torn out, the white and black all but painted over with red and large looping comments in the margins._

_“No, this will not do at all,” he had tutted, pushing a pile of manuscripts across the desk, overshooting the edge. The pages had fluttered into Erwin’s lap, had scattered on the floor like feathers. “There’s too much fluff. Too much flowery language. For God’s sake, you used three thousand words to describe the protagonist waking up!”_

_He had shrugged, leaning down to gather up the pages of Levi’s life, unable to keep himself from smoothing out the folded corners and crumpled edges. He had been thoroughly unapologetic, and had only made half-hearted promises to try and revise some of it for their next meeting._

_“This writing style is thoroughly unlike you, Erwin,” his editor had said with a disappointed finality in his voice as he’d stood up, shaken Erwin’s hand, and marched around the messy office cramped full of words to hold open the door and eject him into the springtime light. “It’s not tight at all. You’re all over the place. The protagonist doesn’t even have a name, and prattles on for ages. It’s so…so self-indulgent.”_

_His voice had softened then, catching Erwin in suspension in the doorway. “I get that you’re still getting over Mike. I get it. Just, if you can, try to get over it sooner rather than later, yeah?”  This, said in the tone of vague apologies, sorry without being sorrowful. The words were hollow in his eardrums, and he had only nodded, gripping the manila envelope with his slaughtered manuscripts inside before making his way into the world again._

* * *

 

And here Erwin was now, standing on a busy sidewalk corner in the Mission District, staring down at the screen of his phone and suddenly lost for words. The icebergs had cracked, straight down the middle, dispersing themselves into little floes of hope, sent out across the black water and waiting for something to take purchase on its slippery, yielding surfaces. Humanity streamed around him, a whirlwind of colors and scents and noises, and he was rooted close to the ground with surprise.

The manila envelope was heavy in his hands, leaden with the weight of a criticism he had no heart to remove. This was Levi they were talking about, real flesh and real blood, and every red slash through the black lines felt like a tangible injury. It wasn’t happiness, nowhere near close to achieving Elysium, and Erwin tapped out an affirmative response on his phone – “Yes, I’d like that” – clutching the manila envelope tighter to his chest and letting the swells of humanity carry him away.

* * *

 

Erwin had knocked on the door to his apartment a little over ten minutes after replying to Levi’s text. He had been clutching the envelope to his chest, a soft, sort of ragged look in his eyes that Levi knew only all too well from long hours spent scrutinizing his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. It was the look of a man lost in the middle of the ocean without a paddle, a man set adrift to his own devices and ejected into the open waters  of the world.

He had bought salt pretzels, still crinkling and warm in their wax paper packets as he’d passed one to Levi. The paper lay in crumpled balls on the table between them, sharp with the smell of mustard, fat granules of salt catching the intermittent streaks of sunlight that filtered in through the window. Levi had welcomed the distraction gladly, had swallowed around the dry mouthfuls, salt chafing at the insides of his lips as he scrambled for his words.

The envelope that Erwin slid across his kitchen table to him was fat, packed full of words of himself, and Levi clutched at his coffee cup harder in a vain attempt to keep his hands from shaking. The last time someone had sat across the kitchen table from him had been with Farlan, years and years ago, and Levi couldn’t help but notice the way Erwin’s silhouette filled out the space where Farlan’s ghost had been, laying dusty across the table.  

 _He shouldn’t have done this,_ he scolded himself as he stared at the bright orange of the envelope, lying between them. Shouldn’t have invited Erwin over, shouldn’t have opened the text conversation on his phone, shouldn’t have thought that maybe it would be okay to paddle out into the open ocean of uncertainty again. Erwin had seemed safe enough, had seemed tender and patient enough, and he had held Levi’s pulse against his palm before, had pressed his mouth to the wounds of Levi’s affection, had rolled them in black satin sheets and had whispered love in lyrics that Levi had thought he might want to understand.

But no. They were incomprehensible, still, weighted down with the magnificently thick envelope in front of him. Levi shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t pick it up, refused to acknowledge that someone had found him like a beacon of light in the darkness.

“So,” Erwin said finally, and Levi braced himself for condemnation, for demanding tones and a voice raised in anger. “What do you do?”

Words plinked across the table, soft, easy, gentle, pebbles slipping into a stream, and Levi relaxed, slow, slowly now. Yes, this was how it had been once, too, he remembered, some lovely golden moments with Farlan before the sun had slipped away behind the clouds, the dimming so gradual Levi had had no opportunity to identify the darkness for what it was.

“I read,” he replied, simply, the words fitting lovely in his mouth like they had before, once upon a time. “I live to read.”

When he looked back up from his coffee, Erwin was staring at him, his eyes crinkled slightly at the corners. Happy, curious, intrigued. It was a method of understanding he hadn’t been subject to in ages, and Levi loosened, melted, dissolved, one soft slow breath at a time.

“And do you like that?” Erwin asked, taking another sip of his coffee.

Levi nodded, his bangs falling in his eyes. He reached up to brush them away from his forehead, the sleeve of his sweater riding up, silver circles for ages. He did not attempt to pull the cuff back down as he reached out for the envelope, feeling its solidity beneath his palm. “You want me to read this?” he asked, looking up at Erwin cautiously even as his fingers found the string binding the envelope together.

“I would,” Erwin affirmed. “I’d like you to read it forever.”

Levi pulled the stack of marked pages out of the envelope, frowning at all the red that crossed the paper like bloody gashes.

“I’ve already read this,” he murmured, looking through the pages. Passages were slashed out, loopy handwriting dancing throughout the margins so that he could barely recognize the original story beneath the  corrections. “It’s about me.”

And yet. His eyes scanned over a sentence halfway through the manuscript again, narrowed in scrutiny.

_[[“Granted, I love you. And, granted, I know that the opposite is not true. Am I a fool for it? Probably. But don’t you think it’s beautiful, that this frozen, frigid heart of mine has come to love again? I am thawing by the day.”]]_

He didn’t recall this sentence, was quite sure it was unlike anything he’d ever read before. He looked up at Erwin, curious, inquisitive, his fingers itching to dance across the lines of his life again.

“Do you think you could bring yourself to read it again, Levi?” Erwin asked. The ripples of his request spread out across the table, lapping against Levi’s hands. He nodded, straightened out the pages of the manuscript, and tried to ignore the way Erwin’s eyes followed him across the kitchen as he got up to pour another cup of coffee.


	13. Antidote

And like cracks in the ice, one chip, one look, one well-placed word was all it took to send them rushing towards spring. Levi bloomed under Erwin’s attentions, the glimmer of a grin blossoming into a smile whenever he opened his front door to let Erwin in, one chapter at a time. Erwin portioned out the manuscript carefully, only a handful of pages per occasion; if the words ran out too fast, or so he thought to himself, Levi would slip out of his life as quickly as he had slipped into it, and Erwin still had so much to learn.  

He would set Levi to work, fighting back a smile as Levi all but grabbed the pages from his outstretched hands, a pen ready to mark and cross out and scrawl comments in the margins with long, slender letters that curled into one another, as though the writer couldn’t get them down fast enough. Levi would curl up in a squashy armchair in his living room, gnawing absentmindedly on the end of his pen while his eyes scanned over Erwin’s words, the words that were starting to change into his own. Erwin’s editor wasn’t happy at all, but Erwin had ignored his alternated warnings and pleas. The story was far more important than just a book deal, and Erwin would not rush it, was not willing to jeopardize the slow, tentative process of Levi’s development. Levi was relaxing, unspooling into the great beautiful spirals of the person he had been before, and Erwin felt like he had only just breached the surface. There was so much more to know, and with every sheaf of pages Erwin gave up, Levi in turn gave up bits and pieces of himself.  

It had taken five visits for Levi to wave his hand nonchalantly and tell Erwin to make himself at home, to give him leave to peruse through the bookshelves crammed full in his living room, to take the measure of his life through the words that he consumed and surrounded himself with. Erwin had been nothing short of flattered to discover that Levi had all of his books, their covers glossy, the spines unbent, the pages neat and uncreased. He had run his index finger over his last name, embossed and raised in metallic silvers and golds, and looked up to find Levi watching him over the tops of the pages he was looking over, his eyes curved into crinkled commas before he’d whisked his gaze away, dropping it back to Erwin’s words.

Today, Erwin had been strolling to Levi’s apartment in the Mission District when he’d been distracted by a young boy on the corner, his arms filled with bunches of peach roses, roaring with all the breath his lungs could hold that the florist’s was having a massive sale, _half-off, half-off, come buy now_! The petals were velvet soft against Erwin’s fingertips, and he bought a dozen of them, their leaking, dethorned stems wrapped tight in crinkling cellophane that crunched in Erwin’s fist as he pressed a bill into the boy’s hand and told him to keep the change. The petals dripped misty sprays of fragrance on his wrist as he walked towards Levi’s apartment, a grin on his face.

Levi opened the door to his apartment with a ready smile, eyes widening as Erwin presented him with the bouquet. Their fingers brushed, and Erwin was gratified to find that Levi didn’t jerk away, even let Erwin’s fingers linger against his own while he shifted the bunch of stems in his hands, the radiance of the petals matching the flush that was rising in his cheeks.

He was beautiful, and he was starting to realize he was beautiful. Erwin knew it, had known it for a while already, but he couldn’t help but think that the beauty was magnified tenfold with the newfound confidence that was starting to blossom in the way Levi carried himself, in the way he delivered his words with surety and definitiveness. Levi no longer hid the burns on his wrist under long sweaters, no longer held his arm at an awkward angle when he curled himself into the armchair with Erwin’s pages, and was rendered only the more gorgeous for his unspoken bravery. A porcelain vessel, cracked, shattered, glued back together with gold so that every flaw became rich with the experiences that had shaped Levi into the man he was today, and Erwin thought that he might be slowly but surely falling in love.

Erwin had brought him flowers, peachy roses whose petals mimicked the color of the sunrises Levi had taken to watching through the tiny slice of window the apartment offered him. He had started to wake up in the early hours of the morning, sprawling out in the predawn grey morning, his limbs painted with the milky light of a day ahead as he splayed himself across the sheets with the confidence of his newfound freedom. _Mine. My apartment, my time. My life._ Erwin had given him back the words that, for all that time with Farlan, had been missing, and Levi was starting to roll them into his vocabulary again, growing accustomed slowly but surely to their heady weight on his tongue. For so long, he’d defined himself as an extension of Farlan, defining himself in terms of others, and coming to discover that he was not a shadow was exhilarating. The morning light flooded through his windows and painted him with gold, and he never missed an opportunity to watch the transformation with breathless anticipation.

Levi curled himself into his armchair in his living room, riffling through Erwin’s pages with a pen in hand, eager to devour and consume the words about himself and to set errant phrases in their proper places. Erwin usually sat down on Levi’s sofa, one of Levi’s books in his hands, waiting patient for Levi to finish his commentary.

“Hey, this is a pretty rare edition of Beowulf!” Erwin exclaimed suddenly, examining Levi’s bookshelves, crammed full of words. “Where did you get it?” He pulled it carefully, reverently, out of the shelf, holding it in his hands, balancing the spine in gentle fingertips as he paged through the book, tracing a finger over the lines.

A jolt of remembrance ran through Levi. _I won’t stand for it_ , Farlan pushing the book unceremoniously into the bookshelves while he’d drowned out Levi’s protests with kisses that had passed for love, scraps of tenderness to reel Levi further and further in before suddenly the line had been cut with his absence.

“Green Apple,” he said after a moment. “We met there. You remember?”

Erwin’s eyes sparkled, curving into crinkled commas as he sat down with the book, his hand cradling the weight of it with care. Hands that had handled him, once, too, and Levi found that perhaps he was starting to wonder what that particular brand of tenderness might be like against his skin, fingers gently massaging at the bruised mess of his heart. 

“How could I forget?” Erwin asked, a smile, a laugh, and Levi’s heart leapt, a blush creeping across the planes of his face as he looked down into his lap to immerse himself in Erwin’s words one more. Memories replaced memories, dreams replaced nightmares, and slowly the winding lanes of Levi’s soul grew familiar to him once more, sweet flooding into his mouth to drown out the bitter.


	14. Mobility

_Love in books wasn’t like this_ , Levi thought to himself as he watched Erwin click out pages, words scrolling to fill the ivory document with his words. No. Their words. Levi’s words, gone unspoken and unthought of for so long that it was a shock to discover that he could still dredge them up and make them dance on the tip of his tongue. 

Love behind the glossy hard spines of books was one step removed, one step too far, and Levi had a good imagination honed with necessity, but the flush he felt blossoming over his face whenever Erwin looked at him, the way his heart skipped a beat when Erwin smiled, it was new, yet unsettling with its familiarity. He had loved Farlan like this, too, hanging on his every word and aching to please, desperate to see the sun behind his smile.

Erwin’s attentions were given easily, his happiness shared freely, and Levi had never felt more deserving of joy. His heart fell back into the old, soothing rhythms of love, but this time, Erwin held him slow and steady, accepting and returning his feelings in the way he looked and listened to Levi as though they had all the time in the world to fit into each other.

Erwin’s apartment had become something of a second home to him, a place to escape the shadows that still haunted the corners of his apartment and ran chilly fingers up and down his spine whenever he discovered some last forgotten puzzle piece of Farlan—a receipt, a jacket, a photograph. All of the silver and wooden picture frames scattered around Levi’s apartment had disappeared, packed away in cardboard boxes that he taped firmly shut and stacked one on top of the other in the tiny hallway closet.

He had been tempted to throw them out completely, but he had stayed his hand. Farlan was part of his past, and as Erwin never failed to remind him, the memories and events of before were useful in charting one’s personal growth to see how far he’d come, and he didn’t want to lose sight of the transformation. Quick as a blink, the memories would wash away if he didn’t hold on tightly to them, and a day in the future would come where he might be able to look on his time with Farlan with regret and remembrance, maybe a bit of nostalgia for the quicksilver flames of their love.

But now, with Erwin framed neatly in the lens of his life, Levi found that suddenly, inexplicably, the loves in his books were just that, four letter words that tried to convey a depth of emotion that refused to be constrained with the rigidity of language. He related to the protagonists in a way that he never had before, a swoop of feeling carrying him in its current, but when Erwin looked over with soft smiles dancing in his eyes, Levi found the water wasn’t deep at all. He could stand on his own two feet and ripple in the waves that would only try to surround him, not overwhelm him, with their soft caresses.

Love in the books was a quick sweep of feeling, burying rationality and taking the main character’s breath away, but loving Erwin, love with Erwin, was nothing like that. It was like a man afraid to touch the water only to find that he slipped into it like a second skin, as though he had known all his life that he could swim. 

Levi was more than capable of loving, and Erwin was more than willing to return his affections in spades.

* * *

 

“Hey, you,” Erwin said, grinning over at him, and Levi startled, surprised to find that the sun was already setting out beyond the hills and painting over the planes of Erwin’s face with gold. He had whiled out the day in Erwin’s apartment once again, and, once again, Erwin hadn’t minded, had tapped away and let the silence stretch between them comfortably like that between two people who didn’t need to fill the spaces with words. “Penny for your thoughts?”

Levi grinned, delighted in the way his smiles came freely to him now, and draped himself over the table, limbs stretching out long and creamy over the wood and his dark hair falling like a curtain over his eyes as he watched Erwin through the fringes. Erwin looked thoughtful, contemplative, looking at Levi with a soft tenderness that made Levi’s breath catch in his throat. 

Erwin looked at him like he was precious, like he was valuable, despite the memories he carried, dark as they were. Erwin looked at him as a whole and found him lovely, not lacking in any way, or ruined by the scars etched on his and in his heart, and it was this more than anything else that Erwin had done that had Levi aching to feather kisses over Erwin’s face, a young sapling straining for the light and starving for affection.

“My thoughts are worth more than a penny, don’t you think?” Levi asked, pushing himself up and propping his head on one of his hands. The other still remained sprawled across the table, casting slender shadows, the circular scars running up the inside of his wrist gleaming silver in the sunlight.

A soft hush fell between them, one charged with potential, and Levi could see the thin luminescent scales that separated them fall away as Erwin reached out and placed his hand over Levi’s. Slow, deliberate. His thumb stroked over the scars, tender and sweet, painting love all into his skin.

“Your thoughts,” Erwin breathed softly, pressing just slightly into a burn, “are worth far more than pennies.” Levi watched from lowered lids as Erwin picked up his hand, lifting Levi’s fingers to his face and fluttering kisses against his fingertips. “Your thoughts are valuable beyond measure.” Erwin’s lips pressed lightly against his scars, and Levi sighed softly, oh, oh, affection returned without expecting anything back in return.

No. Love in the books certainly was not like this at all, and as Levi leaned over the table to taste the soothing flavor of his future, their shadows blended into one on the kitchen table, silhouettes blotting out the scars.


	15. Aloe Vera

Now that the boundaries had melted between them, Levi found it easier to slip back into himself, to find and rediscover qualities and quirks about himself that he had laid by the wayside when Farlan had demanded it. Erwin never forced him to anything, never prodded him to any extremes, and Levi was grateful for the way Erwin held his hand through the process, leading him carefully back to the person he had been before he’d hidden away under a shroud of submission. He cherished Levi’s thoughts and opinions, hung on to Levi’s every word, even if the meaning was something as simple as what Levi felt like having for dinner that night.

Freedom flooded through him, inundating him with choices like never before. Which shop to go to, what he wanted to eat, what he would wear and how late he would stay out. It was unnerving, terrifying, if he was being well and truly honest with himself, but Erwin assured him with gentle words and even gentler caresses that he should take all the time that he needed. They had seconds in spades, and Erwin had no plans to go anywhere any time soon.

But despite Erwin’s reassurances and comforts, it was a reincarnation that Levi would have to undergo himself, slowly, slowly, believing that affection would follow. Weeks passed turned into months passed, and, with their careful attentions, love blossomed and grew, flourishing straight and tall, its leaves unfurling towards the sunlight, and to his credit, Erwin never tried to twist it into a small and stunted bonsai.

He learned to kiss openly again, without fear of being bitten, and enjoyed the way Erwin left his lips kiss swollen, reddened all through with love. Mornings began with kisses that tasted like toast and coffee, and nights ended with kisses like toothpaste, sweet and minty and barely there because they did not have to use force to prove its devotion. Erwin began spending more nights in Levi’s apartment, and his body began to settle into its own weighty hollow on the empty side of Levi’s bed. 

“Chasing out the ghosts,” Erwin had said, with a slight smile one evening, his blonde hair wet from a shower and falling into his eyes, gleaming golden in the lamplight from the nightstand. “But it looks like you’ve already done quite a good job of that.” Levi beamed under the pride that glowed softly behind Erwin’s soothing blue eyes, and had only replied that he’d been fortunate to find a beacon of light bright enough to pierce through the darkness.

Erwin made Levi feel beautiful in a way that he hadn’t felt in ages and perhaps have never quite felt before in that it is a newer, unfamiliar sense of beauty he had not encountered. Erwin made him feel comfortable in his own skin, and now the kisses that Erwin laid against the inside of his wrist filled him with a sparking fire that itched into his bloodstream and caught hold of his dormant desires. More than once, the request for more had been bubbling on the tip of his tongue, but he’d stayed his words, not wanting to appear too greedy, not wanting to hope for too much, fearing Erwin’s refusal.

It happened on a night Levi stayed over at Erwin’s house in Cow Hollow. Erwin had, in his own small ways, started to accommodate Levi into his life, emptying drawers and pushing aside hangers in the wardrobe for Levi’s belongings. Levi stepped out of the shower, steam and heat turning pale skin the lightest tinge of pink and flush, and his hair curled wetly over his forehead as he wrapped a towel around his waist and padded out to the bedroom to rummage for a set of pajamas. Much to his surprise, Erwin was sitting on the bed, his laptop open, frowning as he clicked away at a new chapter, grimacing at a new revision his editor had sent back stricken through with bright red ballpoint pen. He looked up as Levi entered, and immediately averted his eyes, making to get up. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Erwin breathed, apologetic. “I thought you’d taken your pajamas into the bathroom with you, I didn’t know –“

Emboldened, perhaps with the way the hot water had washed his muscles lax and pliant, and given confidence with the weight of Erwin’s respect, Levi found himself at ease. “It’s okay,” he murmured, and the conviction laced through his syllables was surprising even to himself. “I mean it.”

His bare feet left long slender hollows over the carpet as he walked towards Erwin. Nervousness and anticipation battled for ownership of his heart, but the delighted, guarded expectancy in Erwin’s gaze put his quaking soul to rest. 

Erwin gently clicked his laptop closed, set it on the nightstand, and opened his arms. Levi walked into them, letting Erwin’s kisses set him afire like a pyre soaked through with gasoline, and the towel slithered to the floor in a puddle of fluffy white as Levi allowed himself to be laid bare in dark satin sheets. He understood, now, the whispered lyrics of love that Erwin sang into him with every breath and every kiss, and returned it with equal fervor.

He woke up the next morning, deliciously sore, to find Erwin still fast asleep beside him. The sunlight creeping through the window was strong and warming as it painted over Levi’s bare limbs like glossy ivory, a chess piece taken from its box to spill onto a black square of the playing board.

Erwin sighed in his sleep, rolling over to face Levi. He was sporting a new scruff of dark golden stubble along his jawline, and Levi ached to have Erwin’s kisses rub him raw. Greedy. He nudged forward, placing a slender hand against Erwin’s shoulder and shaking him, slightly at first, then stronger when Erwin failed to respond. Erwin stirred, eyelashes fluttering.

“What is it?” he mumbled, squinting at Levi framed in the morning light. “Where’s the fire?”

“In me,” Levi whispered, and smothered Erwin with kisses, needing, asking, receiving, lapping up love like a starving man.


	16. Rising

“What do you mean, this is unacceptable?” Erwin asked, trying hard not to raise his voice, all too aware of Levi’s eyes on him from where he was curled up on a grey armchair in Erwin’s sitting room, a blanket tossed over his lap and a book in his hands. His editor was buzzing away on the other end of the phone after having just reviewed Erwin’s most recent version of his manuscript. 

“It’s exactly what I mean, Erwin,” his editor muttered, clearly frustrated, a sigh in his voice. “It’s so unlike you, this writing style. This subject. It’s not like your other novels, and, frankly, it’s boring. There’s no action, no character development. The protagonist sounds whiny, sounds like a bore. Hell, the whole thing takes place in a psych ward, for God’s sake!”

“Not a psych ward,” Erwin ground out, his fingers digging into his thigh. “A therapist’s office.”

His editor sighed again, buzzing into Erwin’s ear. “Whatever. Same thing, really. You get the point. Something like this won’t sell. Maybe we can rewrite it to add a more interesting plot, maybe a love interest, but someone plodding through a mire of depression isn’t the type of book your readers are expecting from you.”

Erwin wanted to fling the phone across the room, wanted the screen to crack on impact, wanted to leave his editor droning away to the sound of a dial tone. Didn’t he realize that, in its own way, this story was perhaps the most important one Erwin had ever written? Didn’t he realize that the story itself was interesting, the character development subtle but refined? He curled his fingers into a fist against his thigh, his fingernails cutting crescents into his palm as he searched for the right words for a diplomatic response.

“I’m well aware it’s unlike my other stories,” he hedged, stalling for time. Levi’s eyebrows were furrowed, as though he could sense the stress that stretched palpable through the room, tension thick as wires. “But what can I say? It’s something that’s important to me, and I think with my current reader base, it’ll be useful for spreading a message.” 

“What message is that, exactly?” his editor wanted to know. “Because I hate to say it, Smith, but it’s eluding me at the moment.” 

Erwin paused. Looked across the room at Levi, who quickly ducked his head to stare intently at his book, though Erwin could tell he wasn’t reading, was hanging onto each and every one of Erwin’s words like lifelines. What was the message he wanted to send exactly? He couldn’t possibly distill everything down into one or two platitudes like his editor expected; it would be an insult to Levi, who was still forming, who was still fledgling and finding his way back to another version of himself. 

After a few moments of frustrated silence, his editor sighed again, right on track for how most of their conversations had been going ever since Erwin had submitted his first completed draft. It had been a three hundred page document, one that he had printed out for Levi and bound into a laminate folder. He’d watched with childlike enjoyment as Levi had accepted the manuscript into his hands gravely, plopping himself down on the sofa, on the bed, on any available soft surface, to immerse himself in the fictional Levi that Erwin had created. 

He’d read the whole thing from beginning to end in a little over two days, and had returned it to Erwin with a solemn look that had been betrayed by the small smile hovering around the corners of his mouth. 

“It’s very good,” he’d murmured, before reaching over, his hands no longer quite so tentative, no longer quite so hesitant, to stroke along the planes of Erwin’s face and tug him into a kiss. “I liked it a lot.” And then, in a show of brazenness for him, he’d looped his arms around Erwin’s neck, plopping himself down in the seat next to Erwin, and had whispered into his ear that he liked anything that Erwin had ever written.

And here was his editor now, telling him the exact opposite.

“Well, Erwin, what do you say?” His editor seemed to sense the tension he’d inadvertently created, and was trying to backtrack as quickly as possible. “Does that sound reasonable?”

“Do I have any choice but to agree?” Erwin asked, and his editor forced a laugh and told him that he was glad they’d managed to have this little chat. Erwin was met with a beeping before he could hang up the call, and he tossed his phone on the table with a frown of disgust; he’d intended to hang up first, to break the line of communication first so that it would appear as though he still had control of the conversation, but his editor had beaten him to the punch. 

“What was that all about?” Levi asked, arching an eyebrow at him and chewing at his lower lip, thin eyebrows furrowed in worry. “Are you in trouble?”

“In trouble?” Erwin wanted to laugh at the childlike phrasings. “Not at all, sweet. My editor just doesn’t like the story, not one little bit.” 

“Oh.” Levi frowned, a wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows as he pondered this information. “Maybe I could help you redo it?” he asked hopefully, closing his book and setting it aside on a table. Erwin’s manuscript lay next to it, still unmarked, still neatly white and pressed in its folder. Erwin had a sneaking suspicion that the copy in his editor’s office was riddled through with heavy red slashes, entire paragraphs cut out, maybe even entire chapters. His editor hadn’t sounded at all pleased on the telephone, and Erwin had no doubt if he’d opted to go into the office today instead of handling the meeting on the phone, he’d be having some choice conversation.

“Nah, it’s all right,” Erwin sighed, clicking his phone to silent. “I think it’s perfect just the way it is, and if he doesn’t agree, well, that’s just too bad, isn’t it?” 

Levi’s eyes crinkled into curved commas when he smiled, and Erwin winged a silent prayer to whatever gods might exist that he was making the right choice.

* * *

 

Levi had enlisted Erwin’s help in cleaning out his apartment in the Mission District. Erwin had agreed, mainly because it would be something that would get him out of his house and the pent up resentment and despair he had been stewing in ever since the call to his editor.

 

Erwin was taking a well-deserved break from dusting the harder to reach shelves in Levi’s kitchen cabinets when Levi came traipsing into the kitchen with an armload of coats that he deposited on the table in a puddle of dark fabrics.

“What are these?” Erwin asked, fingering a threadbare sleeve that smelled of mothballs and dust, as though it hadn’t been worn in a long time. 

“They’re Farlan’s,” Levi mumbled, not meeting Erwin’s eye, and Erwin remained silent in appreciation of the gravity of the gesture. “I thought maybe, since he’s not coming back, I’d give away his old stuff, but I’d hate giving this stuff to charity.” He pinched the hem of a sleeve between his fingers, lifting it up off the table so the sunshine shone through the holes in the fabric, before dropping it back limply. 

“Hmm.” Erwin contemplated the pile of coats for a few moments. “Maybe we can run them through a wash, patch them up a bit, hand them out to the homeless? I’ve got some experience in stitching patches on stuff, at least, and I could show you how.” 

Levi’s eyes brightened. “That’s a good idea,” he agreed, and a few pricked thumbs and several coats later, they folded Farlan’s old clothes into paper bags, a riot of blues and blacks and greens all stitched together. Levi’s apartment stood half-empty, breathless in restless anticipation, waiting for it to be filled again. 

Levi invited Erwin to leave his coat there that night, and Erwin was more than happy to oblige. His black peacoat from last season hung in the empty half of Levi’s closet, waiting for its companions to join it.


	17. Reentry

The city was sweeping its way rapidly into the last dredges of summer, and despite the months on the calendar fading from June into July into August, San Francisco was still searingly hot. The central air in Levi’s apartment in the Mission District had sputtered to a gentle, disconsolate stop on one such Saturday in late August, and Levi sighed in dismay even as he wrapped sweat slick, sticky limbs around Erwin, sprawled throughout his sheets. Erwin left an imprint on the cotton sheets and the shape of his head in the pillows more often than not, and Levi was truly grateful for it. He had missed the feeling of being in love, of being safe.

“God,” Erwin groused good-naturedly, fanning himself with one limp hand. The ceiling fan batted weakly overhead, wafting the hot air around the room more than cooling it down. “I can’t even think straight with all this heat.” 

“Yeah,” Levi drawled, sighing lazily as he tried to spread himself out on the bed as much as possible. He peeked out at Erwin from beneath a fall of dark, damp hair, grinned when he found Erwin peeking back. “Do you want to go out?” 

Erwin sighed, closing his eyes again and trying not to pout when Levi wriggled closer still to tuck himself against Erwin’s chest. “I would have said no, but since you refuse to stop trying to cling to me like a mollusk, I guess my answer will have to be yes.”

Levi stifled a laugh into Erwin’s shoulder, nudging him in a playful manner that he’d once thought had left him long ago. “Do you want to go to the beach?” he asked, batting the fans of his eyelashes against Erwin’s skin and making a smile bud on Erwin’s face despite himself.

“We’ve been to the beach already twice this week,” Erwin reminded him gently. “And it’s probably crowded as fuck. Trash, germs, hot sand.” He listed off his lazy complaints, his words slurred with fatigue and gentle heat, and Levi rested his hand against the firmness of Erwin’s chest, feeling his heartbeat sluggish beneath his palm. “C’mon, Lee, I’m hot,” Erwin whined, but Levi was in quite a comfortable position himself, and it was only after Erwin’s sincere coaxing and begging that Levi was coerced into nudging back to his now significantly cooler side of the bed. He rolled in the sheets gleefully, enjoying the soft coolness that leached into his limbs while it lasted. 

“The pool?” he suggested. The thought of it made him wrinkle his nose, but Erwin couldn’t see, not with the back of his hand placed over his eyes. “We could go to the public one down on Van Ness.” 

“You don’t even like the pool,” Erwin reminded him, sighing as Levi’s hand crept over the sheets to lace into his free one, but he didn’t budge away. Their palms pressed together soft and sticky. “You said there’s too many kids and the smell of chlorine and sunscreen gives you a headache.”

“I did,” Levi agreed, a warm frisson of pleasure spilling through him at the fact that Erwin had remembered. His scars were silver smooth against Erwin’s wrist. They waited a beat or two in silence, listening to the raucous crows of the seagulls outside and the honks and beeps of assorted traffic.

“We could go to the library,” Erwin murmured just as Levi was about to doze off into another heat-induced stupor. “They have good air conditioning.”

“I’ve already been to the library three times this week,” Levi mumbled, pushing himself up to flip over his pillow to the cool side and pressing the fabric against his cheek. “The librarians will look at me funny.”

“Nonsense,” Erwin said, and though Levi’s face was buried in the pillow, he didn’t need to see to know that there was a smile on Erwin’s face. “They’ll just think you love books, like any good library goer should. That, and I can probably get some work done there, too. Send my agent a strongly worded email about the whole refusal to publish thing, maybe.”

It was this, more than the thought of the potential of the librarians’ suspicious gazes and the library’s good air conditioning, that got Levi to sit up fully. He still wanted to please, wanted to accommodate, but he figured that in moderation it was an acceptable quality to have. Erwin’s requests were gentle, benign, and Levi was more than happy to let them flow over him, through him.

“Okay,” he whispered, leaning across to flutter a kiss over Erwin’s cheekbone. “Let me go wash up, then, and we can get going.” Erwin’s hand came up to thread his fingers through the short damp hair of Levi’s undercut, holding him there until Erwin could turn his head to brush a kiss across Levi’s slack lips. Levi found himself staring into the promise of summer seas, and couldn’t keep a smile from blossoming over his face as he pulled Erwin along to the bathroom.

* * *

 

The library was blessedly cool and silent when they arrived half an hour later. The heavy, glass-paneled door slid open smoothly as Levi pulled it open, smiling abashedly at the head librarian as she gave him a smile and a wave of recognition. He waved back, shyly, before leading Erwin to a table and informing him in a low voice that he would be right back, he would just be looking for something interesting to read. Erwin was already unpacking his laptop, and with a small smile, Levi escaped into the stacks.

The soft smell of yellowing paper and aging library paste comforted him as he wandered through the stacks of books, eyes drinking in the titles and authors and gilded covers with eagerness. He could lose hours between the books, and he ran his fingers absentmindedly over the taped spines, reveling in the smoothness. 

He had just cracked open a new James Patterson that he hadn’t read yet, eyes skimming through the first few pages, when a gentle hand tapped him on the shoulder. He jumped in surprise, his pulse racing until he turned around to find the head librarian smiling kindly at him.

“I noticed you’ve been coming here rather often,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one person so fascinated with the library in all the years I’ve been working here.”

Levi tried, and failed, to stop a blush from coloring his face. The James Patterson mystery he was holding in his hands had been all but forgotten. “I just…like reading,” he said, lamely. “A lot.” 

“Of course you do,” the librarian said, nodding sagely. “And it just so happens that the library’s a bit short of staff at the particular moment. Forgive my presumptuousness, but do you think you might be interested in volunteering here for a bit? You seem to know your way around the Dewey Decimal system quite well.” 

Levi gaped at her. She smiled back at him, expectantly. 

“Oh, and of course, the library has its own air conditioning,” she said, with a little laugh and a wave as though to indicate the stifling heat outside. “And it’s only if you want to! I just figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.” 

Levi relished the request, the feeling of being needed. It was something he was still trying to get used to, and something that Erwin tried to dole out in gentle amounts. But this was different. The librarian didn’t know him, and he could start over. A blank slate. The books seemed to whisper at him gently, encouraging him to spend hours among the weight of their words, and Levi could hardly give her his answer fast enough. 

“I’d be delighted to!” he burst out, unable to keep his grin from blossoming across his face. She smiled back sunnily, gratefully, and led him back to the reference desk to help him fill out a volunteer form.


	18. Stitching

Erwin was happy to see Levi getting out of the house more, of his own volition, and more often than not Erwin would look up from his laptop to find Levi slinging his black messenger bag over his shoulder, ready to head to the library for volunteering. He had a smile on his face that was soft, carefree, uninhibited, and Erwin watched him go with a sense of satisfaction. Levi was finally starting to come into his own, something for which Erwin was beyond grateful for, but he unfortunately couldn’t say the same thing about his manuscript. 

He and his editor had been at each other’s throats about it for the past few weeks now, and Erwin was honestly seriously considering taking his editor up on his threat of just flat-out refusing to publish the book. Fine. That was fine; Erwin was sure he had other shallow novels and storylines somewhere in his junk folder on his laptop. There must have been other ways to get Levi’s story out to the world, Erwin thought furiously to himself as he stared at the irritatingly ever-blinking cursor at the end of the document. 

He’d finished it ages ago, and even though he’d written out a tentative ending, he felt better knowing that Levi had completed the cycle all by himself. The protagonist in Elysium smiled over at the psychiatrist, thanking him heartily. The last meeting in a cycle of twenty meetings, and the psychiatrist smiled back just as happily, reaching out to shake the protagonist’s hand. All that really remained was to give the protagonist a name, and Erwin thought that he might be ready to; he just wanted to ask Levi’s opinion. Maybe when the other man came back from his volunteering shift at the library. 

Erwin sighed in irritation as he paced around the apartment. The air was still, heavy, and despite the recently fixed air-conditioning pumping out chilly air routinely every six and a half minutes, Erwin could still feel the back of his old faded cotton T-shirt sticking slick to the skin of his back. His phone buzzed on the table, and eagerness shot through him like quicksilver; he picked it up, turning the display towards him, hoping that it might be Levi.

It wasn’t Levi, and his hopes wilted quickly like the pot of daisies slumping on Levi’s kitchen windowsill that Erwin had bought him from a flower stall on the corner a week or so ago. Erwin held the pot under the tap, giving it a few sprays of water in the hopes that the plant would perk again. His editor’s name buzzed insistently on the display, and Erwin considered just letting the call ring out. 

No, he decided with a frown as his thumb hovered over the accept and decline buttons, wavering. His editor was ruthless, relentless; he knew damn well that Erwin didn’t have anything better to do on a Tuesday afternoon, and would just keep calling back and calling back until Erwin finally relented and accepted the call. Perhaps he could just decline it? Send his editor one of those stock texts that popped up on the screen, saying he was driving or that he was busy and would call him back later? No, that probably wouldn’t work either, and if it did, Erwin was guaranteed to at least a three-minute voicemail chewing him out over the staticky telephone lines.

With a heavy sigh, Erwin picked up the phone. 

Before he could get a word out, his editor interjected. “Have you gotten to work on your book?” 

Erwin was flummoxed, and his editor’s sharp question gave him pause. “What?” he asked, faintly. His editor sighed over the line, a biting breath that had Erwin’s hand unconsciously curling into a fist, knuckles whitening. “What book?” 

“As per the rules of your contract, Mr. Smith” – ah, his editor was angry with him, it was in the tightly controlled syllables and the use of his last name – “you are required to write at least one book every two years. Now, I don’t need to remind you that the deadline is approaching, and if we want to have any hope of getting your latest on the winter bestseller list, you’ve got to get me a manuscript that I can look at soon.” 

Erwin’s breath hissed between his teeth as he took sharp, controlled breaths, trying to contain the rough jagged anger that had broken into shards in his chest. So this was how they were going to do it, was it? he wondered to himself. They just weren’t going to talk about Elysium, weren’t going to talk about the work and the fear and the pain that had gone into it. They were going to discount it, completely, utterly, thoroughly, and that was something Erwin couldn’t accept.

“Mr. Smith? Are you listening?” his editor buzzed at him over the line. “Do I make myself clear?” There was a thinly veiled threat in his voice, and Erwin didn’t need him to spell himself out to make the message clear. Without an editor, representation went down the drain, and while Erwin was sure there were plenty of other publishing companies that would take him and his work on, he wasn’t sure if any other offers he would receive could top the one his current agent had made him almost five years ago.

“Yes, crystal,” he replied through gritted teeth. “I’ll have something for you in a month or so.” He wanted to punch something, but settled for digging his fingernails into his palm, wincing at the sting of the crescents in his hands. 

“Good. Excellent.” His editor sounded smug, more than satisfied, and Erwin couldn’t hang up fast enough. “The idea you had? The one about the superhero who could make things grow? She’s looking for her brother? I think that might be a nice thing to see coming from you. It could help expand your reader base to the younger population as well.” 

“Sure. Fine,” he muttered, clicking the phone off and dropping it to the tiled kitchen counter with a huff. There was a furious buzz in his veins, a roaring in his ears, and before he was fully aware of what he was doing, he was slipping his wallet and keys into the loose pocket of his jeans and walking down to the convenience store on the corner for a packet of cigarettes and a matchbox. He had his first cigarette on the corner, waiting for the light to change, shaking out the match and dropping the spent blackened stick into the nearest trashcan, doing his best to ignore the glares that the other pedestrians were shooting him.

The nicotine and smoke burned their twin ways down his throat to settle in his lungs, and it took his most concerted efforts not to cough. Gradually, relaxation settled back into his limbs, a vice gone long enough without satisfaction. It was something he’d stopped a long time ago, since meeting Mike. Smoke had irritated his throat, had offended his delicate sensibilities, but there had been many nights when Erwin lay sleepless and staring up at the ceiling, aching for the heat that would burn him up from the inside out. 

Surely there were ways around it, though, Erwin thought to himself, his hands curling into loose fists at his sides as he tapped his foot impatiently on the sidewalk, waiting for the signal to change at the intersection. There had to be a way to get the story out. Important things usually did have a way of making themselves known, but Erwin was still waiting to figure out what those methods were, exactly.

He prayed for a miracle, though he’d long ago lost faith.


	19. Breathing

The first thing Levi noticed when he came back from his volunteering shift at the library was that the apartment smelled like cigarettes and the fresh, burning scent of ash. His heart skipped a beat, unconscious; his hand tightened around the thick leather strap of his messenger bag as he lowered it slowly to the ground in the entrance of his apartment, heavy with books he’d just checked out. The chilly air from the freshly reconstituted air conditioner had the fine hairs on the back of his neck standing on edge, and he grit his teeth tight together as he moved carefully through the apartment. 

He peeked into the kitchen, his hand wrapped loosely around the doorjamb as he peered into the room, fully expecting to see a head of ash blonde hair, the set of a rigid spine resting firmly in a straight-backed kitchen chair.

His breath spilled out, a rush of relief. Only Erwin was in the kitchen, a little frown on his face as he tapped furiously at his laptop, the rapid tak tak tak fire of the keys a welcome sound that Levi had long ago learned to pick out from the white noise of the world outside. A fresh cigarette dangled from the corner of Erwin’s mouth, almost dangerous, almost frightening, and the kitchen window was cracked open to let both the smoke and the cool air out. A sticky warm breeze swept in through the gap and brought with it the sounds of traffic and raucous seagulls. 

Erwin looked up from his screen as Levi tiptoed into the kitchen. “Hey,” he said, the corners of his mouth twitching upward and setting Levi further at ease. This was the Erwin he knew, the one with crows’ feet starting to leave tracks at the corners of his eyes, the one with laugh lines bracketing his mouth, and surely the presence of a cigarette, no matter how loathsome, could ruin the overall effect. “How was your shift at the library?” 

Levi slipped into the chair next to him, sighing with relief as Erwin reached out across the table to place his hand over Levi’s. This was familiar, this was safe, and Levi tried not to think about the smoke wreathing around Erwin’s face. “It was fine,” he agreed. “I shelved a new copy of The Neverending Story today. That was exciting; I thought it had gone out of print a long time ago.”

Erwin shrugged, and Levi tried hard not to stare at the way the grey ash tip of the cigarette had begun to dangle, had begun to droop with the weight of gravity. “It’s not that old, is it?” Erwin asked, turning his attention back to his laptop. He was working on a new manuscript, and Levi wanted to ask what had happened to the other one, the one he had spent so many days and weeks and months writing. “Like 1980s or something I thought?”

It was a question that Levi wasn’t meant to answer; Erwin’s tone was already fading away with disinterest as he began his quick tapping again. “You’re smoking,” Levi said, instead, filling the silence with his words that he had so recently rediscovered. The constellation of cigarette burns on the inside of his arm tingled, sparked with a faint hint of remembered pain, and he drew his hand away from Erwin’s, hiding his arm beneath the table as though it could protect him from the sight.

Erwin looked across at him absentmindedly, perhaps wondering why Levi had retreated so suddenly. “Ah,” he murmured, his eyes widening slightly with realization. He plucked the cigarette out of his mouth, grinding it out into a ceramic ashtray Levi had kept around for more sentimental reason than anything else. Three or so smoldering cigarette butts littered the ashtray, and Levi averted his eyes as though embarrassed as Erwin set the ashtray on the windowsill, waiting for the wind to carry the scent of his transgressions away. The smoke lingered heavy in Levi’s lungs, and he wondered what it said about him, that he still found a faint rill of happiness inside him at the ashy smell. “Bad habit,” Erwin explained. “I’ve been having a bit of a tough time of things with the editor.” 

“Of course,” Levi agreed, watching as Erwin folded his arms across his chest and stared out the window pensively. He snatched a quick look at the new Word document open on Erwin’s laptop; as expected, it was completely different. “Would it be so bad to just…have the story be between us?” he wanted to know. Erwin tilted his head to consider the question for a moment, before shaking his head with a sigh. “Do you want to keep it between us?” he asked, and Levi was grateful that he had still been given the option to choose, the option to opt out. “It’s alright if you do.”

“No,” Levi decided. “It’s a Very Important Thing.” He laid emphasis heavy on the words, like he had heard Erwin doing on the phone to his editor several times in the past, and smiled in response to the small quirk that appeared at the corners of Erwin’s mouth. “I know how much it means to you. To the both of us.” 

“And that’s exactly the problem,” Erwin murmured, his smile fading as quickly as it had come. “It means a lot, to the both of us, and I don’t know how to share its importance.” 

A small silence stretched soft between them, and Levi frowned at the carton of cigarettes next to the laptop, surreptitiously reached out to fix the cardboard box firmly closed. It was over half full, and he breathed in relief for the small assurances that it was just a passing phase.

“Just put it on the Internet,” he said, half-joking, trying to make light of the situation. “Make a few witty jokes about it. Send it to BuzzFeed. It’ll go viral within the week.” He turned to find Erwin staring at him, his expression thoughtful. 

“Maybe,” Erwin said slowly, coming back to the kitchen table and plopping back down in the chair he had vacated. “I’ll think about it.” He leaned over to press an absentminded kiss to Levi’s mouth, the caress of someone who has long learned to be a lover, and Levi accepted it with gladness. The taste of smoke filled his mouth, and this time, he breathed it in with acceptance and the slowly sparking realization that he had been made whole again, that he now had everything to lose.


	20. Pair

“Levi. Wake up.”

Levi yawned, stretching languidly in the warm sheets, peering up at Erwin’s face blearily before turning his head to the side to blink at the fuzzy digital numbers on the clock. 7:03 AM, it read, and he groaned, wanting to burrow back into the sheets and sleep for another few hours, but Erwin was insistent, already waking him up with soft shakes and the rich warm smell of dark roast coffee in the pot. 

“What is it?” he mumbled, frowning up at Erwin, who looked much happier than he’d seen him in months. Erwin’s kisses had tasted like ash and tar for the longest time, but when Erwin pressed his mouth plush against Levi’s now, Levi was hard pressed to find anything that tasted less than clean. Erwin tasted like himself again, fresh and orderly and comforting, and Levi sighed happily as Erwin’s fingers threaded lightly through his hair. “You’re in top form this morning.” 

“You’ll see,” Erwin promised, his smile lighting up the dark bedroom as he tugged and cajoled Levi out of the warm nest of sheets, all but dragging him to the bathroom to wash up and get ready for a day ahead. Levi moved through the motions sluggishly, his limbs still waking up, and Erwin herded him out into the car, pressing a thermos of coffee into Levi’s hands. Levi took a grateful sip, shivering in the soft chill that would burn off by mid-morning.

The city was still waking up, too, and he watched the streets and empty blocks flicking by absentmindedly through the tinted glass as Erwin pointed his car towards Richmond. The first coffee and fruit vendors were starting to pull their metal carts out to the curbs, stamping and shivering in the cold, and reluctant joggers were just starting to head out for the first morning run.

Erwin parked his car in a rare spot on the curb by the Green Apple bookstore, and Levi hopped out obligingly, staring up at the all too familiar dark awning and wondering what Erwin had in store. Erwin was feeding quarters into the meter, a smile blossoming over his face, and Levi couldn’t help but grin back at the sheer joy spotting over Erwin’s face.

“They’re closed,” Levi began to protest as Erwin took him by the hand and pressed forward to knock at the glass door of the bookstore. The bookshelves outside were still empty, waiting to be filled by the first employees of the morning, and Levi wondered what sorts of selections would be available today. “We can’t just –“ He was interrupted by the soft tinkling of bells overhead; an employee had opened the door from the inside, and was now greeting Erwin with an overly effusive joy that, on anyone else, Levi would have found sickeningly cloying and false. 

The shop was still dark, still covered with a soft hush in anticipation of the day ahead. Levi followed Erwin to the back of the store, his footsteps muffled on the hardwood, and nearly ran into him among the dim shelves as Erwin stopped abruptly. They were standing in front of the small alcove where he’d seen Erwin in the shop for the first time, and the memories filtered in softly, a gentle haze of admiration, adoration, to fit Levi with rose-colored glasses that would never shatter.

Erwin stepped aside, made a sort of bowing gesture as he indicated the table piled with books that had been set up. Levi approached it tentatively, picked up a glossy paperback. Erwin’s name wasn’t raised in silver or gold leaf like he was used to, and the cover looked suspiciously like a stock picture. Levi frowned at it, looked over at Erwin, who looked giddy and excited. He cracked open the book in his hands. 

The dedication was written in a soft, curving script that Levi had to squint at to make out. For LA, it read, and Levi felt a flush crawl across his face. There was little question as to who the LA in the dedication was, though the connection might not be obvious to anyone else. The publisher’s page was missing entirely.

“But this is, this is that story,” Levi sputtered, flipping lightly through the book. The scent of freshly printed paper and new ink floated up from the pages. He’d thought Erwin had scrapped it entirely, months gone swirling down the drain, had resolved never to talk about it again. It was more about the journey than the destination, and all that. 

“It is that story,” Erwin agreed, smiling proudly. He dropped his voice lower, checking over his shoulder to make sure the bookstore employee was out of earshot. “It is your story.”

Levi’s fingers traced absentmindedly over the loops of the title. “Elysium,” he read slowly. “And that means?”

“A state of perfect happiness,” Erwin replied, quickly, as though he’d been anticipating the question. “You’ve found it again.” His eyes searched Levi’s face anxiously, as though hoping Levi would not contradict him. “You’ve found yourself again.” 

Levi smiled, setting the book back down on the table to join its counterparts. He slipped his hand into Erwin’s, lacing their fingers together. “I was never missing,” he whispered, and watched ecstatic as Erwin’s eyes lit up into a smile.


End file.
